Too Strong A God
by Aki-Chan04
Summary: Percy and Nico have discovered that they like each other, but just as their relationship begins to form there is an attack at Camp Half-Blood. Percy must now embark on a quest to rescue Nico from the Underworld. Note: Contains male/male content. Complete.
1. Author's Note

Author's Note:

This story is actually a continuation of a shorter fic I wrote, Blue Birthday Cake, which is up on as a standalone fic. Because I re-titled it and ended up continuing it as part of a larger story, I've included it here as the first chapter. If you've already read it, then please feel free to skip ahead to Chapter 2! I just wanted to include it here because the rest of the story picks up immediately afterward and it seemed strange to just start there without the beginning in place!

Also: This fic contains a relationship between two male characters. If this squicks you, please do not read it! Flames will be reported as abuse. I don't mind constructive criticism, but if you have nothing reasonable to say and only want to threaten me, I will report you.

Finally, this fic contains spoilers up through the end of The Battle of the Labyrinth, in case you haven't finished it yet.

Thanks, and on to the fic!


	2. Chapter 1: Blue Birthday Cake

_Nico glanced inside my room. His eyebrows furrowed. "Is that… is that blue birthday cake?"_

_He sounded hungry, maybe a little wistful. I wondered if the poor kid had ever had a birthday party, or if he'd ever even been invited to one._

_"Come inside for cake and ice cream," I said. "It sounds like we've got a lot to talk about."_

- Rick Riordan, The Battle of the Labyrinth

-

When I introduced Nico to my mom, you would have thought I'd introduced her to a half-drowned hungry kitten or something. She took one look at him and started fussing, in a way that I think only moms can. Nico just looked uncomfortable and took it. If Mom noticed, she didn't let on. She just steered him over to the kitchen table and sat him down before giving him a paper plate with a slice of cake on it.

Tyson stayed in the living room with Paul and the Monopoly board. I hung back too, trying to convince Paul for the second time that day that it was normal for people to come and go using the fire escape (even though it really wasn't). But it wasn't like we could have told him the truth about Dad. Well, not yet.

It was the strangest thing – the whole time I was there talking to Paul and Tyson, my eyes kept being drawn back to Nico. He was like a black spot in the middle of Mom's bright kitchen, talking to her awkwardly and taking bites of blue cake with a white plastic fork. I couldn't help but notice the blue frosting smudged at the edge of his mouth. Thankfully Mom noticed it too, and she chuckled and wiped it away for him.

It was pretty late by that point. Mom insisted that Nico stay over for the night. "Oh, really, it's no trouble at all! Percy doesn't bring home many friends, and you shouldn't go out alone at night." I rolled my eyes, but when she was like this it would be no use telling her that Nico was technically older than I was, and that he was the son of Hades. He could handle himself in New York. I guess the fact that he'd had to leave his Stygian iron sword in my bedroom didn't help.

Nico didn't have much choice but to agree – my mom's a force to be reckoned with sometimes. You'd think with all we've done and seen, one mom wouldn't be so intimidating, but you'd be wrong. So Nico stayed, which was fine with me, because he'd said he wanted to talk. And so did I.

But when Mom sent us to bed and turned out the light, shutting the door behind her, there was silence. Nico was on the floor in an old sleeping bag that Mom had pulled out of the closet. I wasn't sure how long we'd had it, or even if it was all that comfortable, but Nico didn't seem to mind. I kind of minded, though, because he had my pillow. Sure, I'd slept plenty of times – and in worse places than on a bed – without a pillow. But that didn't meant that I liked it.

I wanted to say something, but I didn't want to scare or anger Nico out of saying what he'd come to say. I didn't want to change his mind, because I knew how he felt about me. So I laid there and stared at the ceiling, waiting for him to say something first. I might've laid there for hours. Or it might've been minutes. It was hard to tell in the dark. But finally, he said something.

"Hey, Percy?"

I rolled over onto my side, glancing down at the inky figure on the floor. The only part of him that reflected the light from the window was his face and eyes. He looked kind of otherworldly, but not in a bad way. "Yeah?"

"Can we talk?"

It was a weird thing to ask. I mean, he'd been the one to show up at my window and say that _he_ wanted to make _me_ an offer. Something about beating Luke. About the _only_ way to beat Luke. Of course I wanted to talk.

"Yeah, sure," I said, and tried to look attentive, though it probably didn't matter. Even with the light from the window, it was pretty dark in my room.

I heard shuffling, and I could see enough to tell that Nico was sitting up. "It's kind of… weird," he said, and his voice sounded strange. Kind of strained. Like he was afraid to talk to me. I felt my stomach twist a little – I had to convince him we really were on the same side. That he was doing the right thing by helping us. I knew it was still an uphill battle, even though he'd been the one with the offer.

"Well, it's about Luke, right?" I asked, sitting up myself. "That's not weird – I mean, we both saw what happened to him. We can't let Kronos – "

"No," Nico said, interrupting me. "It's not about Luke. It's not about any of that. I mean, I do want to help. I do have an offer. But that's not what I want to talk about right now."

Now I was confused. What else could he want to talk about? Was he still mad at me about Bianca? He'd been mad at me for a long time – I mean, up until only a couple of weeks ago I'd thought he was coming after me to trade my soul in to bring her back from the Underworld. But I thought he'd gotten over that, especially after… Well. After the battle. "What is it, then?"

"Have you…" I saw him twist his blankets in the dark, as he hesitated. "Have you ever liked someone?"

For a minute, I was sure I hadn't heard him right. Nico was asking me for dating advice? I couldn't imagine why he'd want to ask me something like that. I mean sure, I'm older than he is. And I guess I've had more experience with girls, but I'm not sure that _experience_ would be what I'd call it, exactly.

"Nico – " I faltered, feeling as awkward as he sounded. "I don't think I'm exactly… um, right. To be talking to about this, I mean. Maybe you should talk to Grover." He and Juniper seemed pretty okay. They'd probably have loads of advice for Nico. Loads better advice than I could give him, anyway. Lately I felt like I had a big sign over my head that said **GIRL TROUBLES HERE** or something. I mean, even Paul had picked up on it. Though maybe it was just because he was a guy, too.

There was silence for another minute. I cringed, thinking he was probably mad at me again. But then he said, "I guess I just mean… Do you think I should tell someone if I like them?" He sounded a little defeated. It made me feel bad. And even though it was weird, I wanted to help.

But I still wasn't really an expert or anything. And the question sounded like it would be an easy one to answer, but it really wasn't. Should he? How should I know? It probably depended on the person he wanted to tell. I thought about Annabeth for a minute – but then I frowned, thinking that things with her didn't make sense either. I mean, sure she'd kissed me underneath Mount St. Helens that one time, but she'd said it was because she was afraid I was going to die. And then she got mad at me any time I said anything about Rachel, and it wasn't like she and Rachel got along either. But neither of them seemed like they wanted to say anything to me about it. Was I just supposed to know?

The whole thing made me confused, and so I considered Nico's question in light of that. And finally I said, "You know what? Yeah, I think so. I mean, how else are they supposed to know? Nobody's a mind reader." Well, at least I didn't think anyone was. Chiron sometimes had the ability to make it seem like he was, but I didn't think it was exactly Chiron Nico was talking about. I sure hoped not, anyway.

"Oh. I guess you're right, yeah," was his reply, and I could tell he was thinking about it. He shuffled a little more, turning towards my bed. "I guess it is hard to figure out how they'd react if they didn't even know."

"Well, yeah," I agreed, rubbing the back of my neck with one hand a little uncomfortably. It was weird talking about this with Nico – I mean, I wasn't really good at dealing with it myself, so I didn't exactly feel qualified to be giving anybody else advice. Especially someone as touchy as Nico. But it sounded like he'd kind of made up his mind. Maybe he had before he'd even asked me. Maybe he just wanted some reassurance, a little confidence from someone else. It wasn't like he had a lot of friends. I owed him that much, at least. He was all right. I thought it might be good if he could talk to someone honestly about his feelings. Especially if it was someone who could make him happy.

"Right," Nico said quietly, and I figured that was the end of it. Which was good, because my stomach still felt like it was kind of in knots, and it was a weird feeling to be getting around a guy. The only other times it had felt like that were when Annabeth would get all teary-eyed at me – especially when she got angry at me right afterwards. Or when Rachel would say something in that way she sometimes did, where she could make you feel really stupid and really smart all at the same time.

"So," Nico continued, and I told my brain to shut up. It sounded like he was ready to talk about more serious stuff now. Maybe now he wanted to talk about Luke. "I know we haven't always… well, you know, gotten along."

"It's okay," I said – I mean, I understood. He'd been confused for a really long time. His sister had died. I mean, who wouldn't be confused? And if he hadn't been angry, I guess it probably would've been weirder. Although he could've joined our side a lot earlier and I probably wouldn't have complained. "Go ahead. You said you – "

But he interrupted me then. And he didn't say anything about Luke. What he said was, "No, listen. This is still… About before. Percy, I just… I like you."

I felt like I'd been hit by a seven-ton Cyclops running full-tilt. Or maybe just a subway train. It was like my brain shut off, but a second later it started back up again, trying to go in a thousand different directions at once. Me? Nico liked _me_? Was that even _possible_?

Okay, sure I knew it was possible. I was a half-blood – we studied Ancient Greek history a little at camp, and it was kind of impossible to keep that sort of stuff from coming up sometimes. The counselors always kind of glossed over it – well, the same way they glossed over a lot of stuff in the myths. Especially when they got to the parts about how most of the heroes had been conceived. I guess they thought they could keep stuff like that from us and we wouldn't notice. Or maybe they knew they couldn't but they felt like they had to at least put up a front.

So why were my insides still all in knots? I mean, it felt like the kind of knots you get before you go on a roller coaster you've been dying to try. Not like the kind of knots when you're going into a reading comprehension test with dyslexia like mine. My stomach felt like it had dropped through the floor of the apartment to street-level, and my heart was pounding and suddenly all I could think about was the blue cake crumbs on Nico's lips and his pale face and his shaggy black hair…

"Percy? Aw, crap, I'm sorry." There was movement – Nico had detangled himself from the sleeping bag and I could see him grab his sword up from the floor as he stalked over to the window. He was going to leave. He thought –

Suddenly I didn't want him to leave. I was out of the bed and at the window before he was, blocking it so that I had to squint into the room as I blocked the only source of light. "Nico, wait! I didn't mean… you kind of took me by surprise." I didn't really know where to go from there, but I definitely knew I didn't want him to leave. I guess that was a start. But I didn't think it would be enough.

I could just make out his frown as he stood awkwardly before me, like he really wanted to go now, more than ever. My heart was pounding so loud that I wouldn't have been surprised if everyone in the apartment could hear it. My legs felt a little weak and my stomach was still in knots, but everything was kind of tingly. I didn't get it, but it felt familiar.

And then I realized what it was. It felt kind of like that time when Annabeth kissed me. Frantically, I tried to stall for time. "Nico, look. Believe me, you just surprised me. I… I've been having some, uh…" I tried to think of the best way to put it, but he beat me to the punch.

"Girl trouble," he said flatly. I cringed. "I should've realized before I said something. Look, Percy –"

"But that's just it," I went on, because suddenly things were untangling. It was weird, like there had been this big knot in my head and I hadn't even known it was there, but as soon as Nico had said something it had started unraveling until I understood what was going on. Why Rachel and Annabeth were so weird around me, why _I_ was so weird around them…

Why I couldn't tear my eyes away from Nico now.

"I have been having a lot of girl trouble," I admitted. "But," I continued, not giving him the chance to break in, "I think I realize what that means now. I mean, I just… don't get them. They don't… They don't _tell_ me stuff. Not like the way you just did now." I paused, looking at Nico in the dark. I thought about what I'd just told him a few minutes ago, about how no one's a mind reader. If Annabeth or Rachel had wanted me to understand something, then all they had to do was tell me. But they hadn't. And Nico had.

I finally understood what all of it meant, like one of those epiphanies that you read about in books. It hadn't exactly come to me the way I'd though it would – not that I'd ever exactly expected to have an epiphany in the first place. But there it was, at the end of the untangled string in my head, and it made so much sense that I almost wanted to laugh.

Nico was sullenly silent, like he was daring me to get to the point. So I did. "I like what you just did. I get it. It's not like with Annabeth. Or even Rachel. I like… I like hanging out with you, Nico. I think…" I took a deep breath, thinking of that white plastic fork and the blue birthday cake and Nico sitting in my kitchen talking to my mom. "I think I could like you, too."


	3. Chapter 2: I Like You In My Life

It took us about a week to get the kissing thing down. The only experience I'd had with _that_ had been that one time with Annabeth under Mount St. Helens, and Nico had never done it before so we were both on pretty shaky ground. Besides, we knew we were mutually interested so we didn't need to do stuff like that to prove anything to one another.

The first few times it was mostly just the two of us awkwardly pressing our mouths together in the morning or before Nico disappeared in the afternoons. Just because he was hanging out with me a lot didn't mean he wasn't still interested in all those things he'd told me before. He was still trying to look up who'd paid for his and Bianca's schooling and, more importantly, who their mother had been. That took up most of his time. He didn't even know her name, or if she was still alive.

I had stuff of my own to do, anyway. Since Paul was a teacher at Goode High School, he brought me the reading lists for the year so I could get started early. Plus Mom had suddenly decided that the entire apartment needed cleaning out, and of course she enlisted me to help. I spent probably half a week sweeping and scrubbing and packing things into boxes and then moving furniture around until she'd decided what looked best. The furniture in our living room changed configuration three times in as many days. I think Nico thought that was kind of funny.

It wasn't until almost six days after my birthday that we figured out what kissing was really about. Nico stayed over at night, and Mom didn't seem to care as long as we weren't loud after she declared lights out. I don't know if she knew something was up or if she just thought it was nice that I had a regular friend that I was spending so much time with. I kind of hoped it was the latter. Or maybe she was just looking out for Nico. I mean, she knew how hard it was for a half-blood, and I knew how lucky I was to have such a good relationship with my mom.

The day before that, Nico had abandoned the sleeping bag on the floor and tried sleeping on the bed with me. It was nice, because I got my pillow back, but kind of awkward at first. It was too hot for blankets even with the A/C on, so he'd laid down beside me on top of the sheets between my right side and the wall. Pretty much only our elbows were touching. I think I laid awake for almost an hour that night, even though Nico had fallen asleep pretty quickly. It was weird, to feel someone else beside me like that. Especially on my own bed, which had always only had me in it. If we'd been sleeping someplace like a chamber in the Labyrinth or camping outside somewhere in the woods, it would've been different. But I guessed I was going to have to learn to share my bed from now on, and eventually I managed to fall asleep.

When I woke up early the next morning, Nico had rolled over during the night so that his chest was pressed against my side and one arm was flung over my stomach. It was weird, but that felt more comfortable than the way we'd gone to sleep had. As soon as I moved a little he woke up and jerked back, blushing, but I just snuck an arm around him to calm him down. "It's okay," I'd told him, trying to grin even though I was pretty sure I was blushing too. "You can sleep like that if you want to."

He'd nodded after a minute and we'd fallen asleep again until my mom had knocked on the door a few hours later. Then both of us sprang out of bed so fast that Mom laughed at our expressions when she opened the door a few seconds later and said that she was glad we were so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed that morning. I didn't feel bright-eyed or bushy-tailed, just mostly glad that she hadn't opened the door while we were both still on the bed.

That night when we'd settled down to sleep again, Nico propped himself up on my chest a bit so he could use me as a pillow. I had one arm around his shoulders and it was pretty comfortable, just the two of us like that in the dark. But just as I was starting to get drowsy Nico had moved, pushing himself up until we were face-to-face. He leaned down and kissed me, but this time it was different. It was softer, somehow, and wetter. He didn't move away again like he usually did, but he did do something that almost made me jump. Just as I thought he was going to move, something soft and wet traced the edge of my lip. Nico's tongue.

I was so surprised that I opened my mouth. I don't know why, maybe I had been planning to say something. But then I realized that Nico's mouth was open too, and pretty soon we'd discovered just why everybody seemed to like kissing so much. We weren't exactly good at it, at first, and it was pretty messy and wet. But we must've practiced for almost half an hour before Nico had yawned and settled back down against my chest and we fell asleep.

The next night we practiced some more, and after a few practice sessions I figured we were getting pretty good at it. It's not like we spent hours at it or anything, but we did spend long enough that I always got a warm, excited feeling in my stomach and my hands and feet would get tingly. It was always hard to just go to sleep after that. I usually had to wait until everything cooled down before I could close my eyes and try to sleep.

The last days of summer wore on, until one afternoon Nico asked me to come to the library with him. He'd been going through the city's archives, looking for something that might identify his mother or his benefactor. He hadn't been having much luck, and I wasn't sure how another set of dyslexic eyes was supposed to help him, but I went anyway.

We'd gotten most of the way to the library when Nico's father had shown up.

That's right, Hades himself. I'd met him before on his own turf in the Underworld. But even here in the sunny, sweltering streets of New York City, he was intimidating. He wasn't ten feet tall anymore, but he was probably still pushing six and a quarter, and his jet black hair laid perfectly even in the shimmering heat rising from nearly every concrete surface in the city. He didn't look hot at all, even though Nico and I were sticky just from having walked from Grand Central Station to Fortieth Street.

He stepped into our path and both of us came up short. Around us the sunlight seemed to turn pale, and all the noise of the city suddenly quieted until it sounded like what you could hear from my window above the street. Nico paled. His hand reached to his side for his sword, but he'd left it in my room like he usually did. Unlike Riptide, his sword didn't disguise itself as anything, and you couldn't really walk into the Mid-Manhattan Library with a sword strapped to your hip. I took a step forward, reaching into my pocket for my pen, but Hades held up a hand and spoke before my fingers could close around it.

"You won't need that here," he said. I could feel him exerting his power over me, my hands trying to fall to my sides of their own volition. I clenched my teeth and forced my fingers to pull the pen from my pocket. I'd overcome Hades' coercion before. I wasn't going to let it get to me now.

"What do you want?" Nico asked, staring up at his father with dark eyes. "Why are you here?"

Hades turned his gaze on his son now, and I got the feeling that I might as well have been on the moon for all they cared. "The question is," Hades said in that cold, dark voice, "why are _you_ here? You abandon me just like your sister did. You associate yourself with him." He made a dismissive gesture at me, like I couldn't hear what they were saying.

"He's my – friend," Nico faltered. His fist curled at his side. "And my ally."

Hades snorted. "Your friend? Your ally?" He looked at me and it reminded me of the way Clarisse looked at someone she was about to beat into the ground at sword practice. "He is neither of those things. You forget yourself, and you forget what he is. It's in his blood to shun you." His eyes narrowed. "It's in all their blood. You will end up alone, just as I am alone."

Silence fell, and I could see Nico's face get even paler. It just made me angry. How could Hades know that? Just because he'd been shunned by the gods didn't mean that was going to happen to Nico. All the same, I couldn't help but remember what Nico had said to me just before I'd left camp just a few weeks ago. _"There's a reason they didn't put a cabin to Hades here, Percy." _

But he was wrong. They were all wrong. Nico _wasn't_ his father any more than I was _my_ father. "He's not like you!" I burst out. Talking back to Hades probably wasn't the smartest thing to do, but I couldn't really help it. I felt like I had to defend my honor, if not Nico's. "He has friends. He has people who care about him. He's not like you."

Hades drew himself up to his full height now, looking down his long, pale nose at me with eyes that were much darker and deeper than human eyes. "Not like me? We'll see. And just what do you think _your_ father is going to have to say about this?" My stomach dropped like I was on a roller coaster, and suddenly I wasn't sure I really wanted Hades' attention anymore. "What do you think Zeus is going to say about this? None of the gods are going to be on your side, Percy Jackson." He looked from me to Nico and back again. "We'll see who's like who, in the end."

And then he was gone. The sunlight brightened, and the sounds of people and cars suddenly resumed around us like the volume had been turned back up to normal. Nico and I were almost run over by a group of giggling girls as they plowed over the sidewalk where we were standing. I managed to yank Nico off to the side, where we pressed our backs against the glass window of an electronics store and both of us stood there panting like we'd just run the mile test in gym class.

I looked to the side. Nico still looked pale, and he was staring at the street as people kept walking by us, oblivious. "Nico?"

He turned and looked at me like he was surprised to see me there. Then he took a breath and his features slipped back into a mask of indifference. "I'm okay."

I knew he wasn't. But what was I supposed to say? _"Hey, don't worry about it, your dad's just being a jerk,"_ didn't exactly seem like it would fix the situation. I nodded, and put my pen back into my pocket. "Do you still want to go to the library?"

"… Not really," he said, after thinking about it for a minute. "Can we just go back?"

That was the first night we made love.

I'd never really understood why people called it that except as a euphemism. I was a fifteen year-old guy and sex was sex. I'd always thought that even if it had something to do with love, the actual act sounded too sweaty and dirty to be called something like that. I'd figured it was something girls probably perpetuated to make it sound more important that it actually was.

It turns out I was as wrong about that as I was about kissing.

Nico and I had started out by kissing, in fact – kissing a lot, which I certainly didn't mind, because by then I'd really started liking kissing Nico. It was still a little awkward, since we usually sat side by side on my bed to do it, but that night Nico crawled onto my lap with one knee on either side of my waist and kissed me like that. I could feel the heat from his chest through the fabric of our t-shirts, and it made my stomach twist and get hot, and other parts of me as well.

I was secretly really embarrassed – I mean, I knew what a hard-on was. I'd woken up in the middle of the night after some pretty intense dreams with them, so I knew why I was reacting that way and I wasn't exactly surprised. But what scared me was the fact that if Nico were to put any of his weight on me at all, he'd know I had one too. I put my hands on his waist to keep him up so he wouldn't lean down, but luck was not on my side. That only seemed to make Nico do exactly what I'd been worried about – he sank down the rest of the way onto my lap right in the middle of a kiss. And then he made the strangest little half-squeaking sound in the back of his throat and pulled back, looking at me.

All I could do was stare back at him. I felt my face get hot and I knew I must be blushing. I expected Nico to move away – I figured he'd be pretty freaked out or disgusted or something. But then I realized that… well, there was something hard pushing against _my_ hardness. And he was starting to blush too.

"Percy…" he whispered, biting his lip and he suddenly looked really, really cute like that. His dark hair was falling over one eye and his cheeks were splotchy and red. I think I must have started grinning pretty stupidly, because Nico made a face at me. But then he moved against me and things rubbed against other things and I definitely stopped grinning because it was hard to concentrate on anything other than how good that felt.

"Percy," he said again, and I looked at his splotchy face and wondered if he was going to say we should stop. But he just leaned forward until his face was beside mine and said, "I want to have sex."

I stared at him. Sure, I'd had sex ed in school. Just last year all the boys and girls in my class had been taken into separate rooms, and we'd sat there and snickered while one of the gym teachers had shown us some video that looked like it was from the seventies that was supposed to explain what was happening to our bodies. It didn't really explain anything at all, and the slides that he showed afterward were pretty gross and didn't make much sense either. Despite all that, by the end of the year most of us knew what sex was, but it hadn't been because of anything the teachers had showed us. Most of it came from sniggers and jokes during lunch or drawings of stick figures scribbled in somebody's notebook.

And now Nico was sitting on my lap, and he looked scared. At first I thought he was just scared that I'd get mad or say no or something because I hadn't answered straight away. But then I realized that wasn't it at all. It was something bigger than that. He was scared because of what had happened earlier that day with his father. Scared that _I'd_ been scared away from him, maybe, or that I'd decide that Hades had been right. I'd be lying if I said it hadn't made me think. I mean, I knew it wasn't exactly... usual for two guys to do stuff like this. Especially not two guys like _us_. We were special among people that were already special. And that meant that everyone paid attention to what we did – even stuff that should have been private. Stuff like this.

I had to admit, I was pretty scared too. I'd tried not to think about it too much before then, but the truth was I'd known that we couldn't get away with something like this for long. The gods pretty much knew everything whether you wanted them to or not. I didn't know what my own dad would think about this, whether he'd be glad or angry or something else entirely. I didn't even know what Mom would think, but I was definitely scared to tell her anything either.

But none of that seemed important right now, with Nico here. I realized I still hadn't said anything. And I also realized that there was no way I could tell him no. Not because I felt I would hurt his feelings if I refused, but because I realized I didn't want to refuse. This was something I'd started wanting, too. This was something that would bring us closer.

The fact that I'm a fifteen year-old boy and I had a pretty good hard-on going probably had something to do with it too. I won't deny that. But a lot of it was the way Nico looked and the way Nico talked and the way I'd come to really like having Nico in my life like this. When I thought about Hades and his threats, it only made me want this more. There was nothing wrong with that, right? Besides, it wasn't like I could accidentally get him pregnant.

I swallowed and nodded. "Yeah," I said, my voice sounding strange and hoarse, even to me. "Yeah, I do too."

Now, just because I _had_ gotten some kind of sex ed talk didn't mean that I knew what I was doing. In fact, I really didn't, because even though I kind of knew how a guy was supposed to do it with a girl, I really didn't see how a guy could do it with a guy. I guess that must have shown on my face, because Nico gave me a little smile and settled back against my pillow, pulling me down with him. "It's not hard. I can tell you what to do."

Part of me wanted to ask how Nico knew what to do when I didn't. But I figured it was better not to ask. Well, either that or the way he was rubbing against me again was making it hard to think. About then was when I stopped caring and let him take the lead.

When I sank into him, it was the most amazing thing I have ever felt. I've felt a lot of amazing things in my life – I can breathe underwater and I've flown on a pegasus's back and I spent two weeks on Calypso's hidden island. But none of that could compare at all to the way that Nico felt around me. I went as slow as I could, because even though I'd snuck out and stolen a bottle of Mom's lotion, I could tell it hurt Nico. He didn't look like he cared much, but that didn't mean I wanted to hurt him any more than I had to.

Time seemed to slow down. Every movement was slow and painfully deliberate. We moved together for a lot longer than I would've thought possible, until Nico's breathing hitched and he grabbed at me from everywhere at once and pulled me over the edge right behind him.

We woke up the next morning tangled together on my sticky bedsheets and smelling like the bottle of Enchanted Orchid body lotion lying on my bedroom floor. Nico still had on his black t-shirt and his hair was sticking up in tufts around his head. I grinned and shoved his shoulder a little and he groaned and rolled over, muttering about how next time _I_ would get to be the one who was sore in the morning. That just made me grin wider and curl up next to him, and we drowsed until Mom knocked and scared us half to death when she called through the door that she was going to make blue pancakes for breakfast.


	4. Chapter 3: Beginning To Change

I woke up in the middle of the night, my chest heaving. My skin felt prickly and damp. I glanced over at Nico sleeping beside me, but he didn't show any sign that I'd woken him up. So I lay there on my back, staring at the ceiling and trying to take deep breaths to calm my racing heart.

I'd been having the same kind of dream for days now. Well, I guess it was more of a nightmare – I'd dream that I was lost in the Underworld, trying to find Nico. I would search and search, but I could never find him. Sometimes I would hear Nico calling my name, but I couldn't locate the sound. I would wander deeper and deeper into the Underworld until I was hopelessly lost. I knew that even though I was Nico's only hope, I was going to fail him and die alone, trapped.

Now, I know that half-bloods rarely have dreams that are random. Especially when they're recurring. But I didn't know what a dream like this meant, unless Hades was just trying to scare me like he'd tried to scare Nico. And I refused to be scared away from him, even by the gods. So every time I would have a nightmare, I would lie awake for a while until I had calmed down enough to go back to sleep. The dreams always seemed less important in the morning, anyway.

The next day was Saturday, so at least I got to sleep in a little. Mom had gone out for the day – Paul was taking her to an art gallery and out to dinner afterward. It was late afternoon, but Nico and I hadn't really done much all day. There was only the weekend left until school started, and I didn't know what was going to happen then. I mean, Nico wasn't going to go to school, and I wasn't sure Mom was going to let him stay over all the time when I had homework and stuff I was supposed to be doing. Of course, I would've much rather spent time with Nico, but I was pretty sure that was why she wouldn't be thrilled if he was around all the time.

I was lying on my back on the couch, propped up against the arm with a couple of the cushions. My jeans were pooled around my ankles and Nico's were on the floor with his shirt. Nico was straddling my hips, his fingers digging into my sides as his breath hitched and we both arched almost in unison.

Just as we'd finished and he'd slumped down to rest his forehead against my shoulder, both of us grinning and panting, someone buzzed at the door. We both jumped. Nico groaned, and we waited to see if they would just go away. After all, we weren't exactly in a fit state to deal with company. And we weren't expecting anybody.

The bell buzzed again. Then a third time. Whoever it was, they sounded impatient. Finally they just leaned on the buzzer and I rolled my eyes, pushing at Nico to get him to crawl off my lap. I yanked my pants up and waited for him to pull his rumpled clothes on before I headed for the door, but his hand caught the back of my shirt and stopped me an inch away from the handle.

"Your shirt," he said, with a nod to my front. I looked down and realized there was a big blotchy stain on it, where… Well, I ran into my bedroom to pull on a new one while Nico answered the door.

"Nico? What are you doing here?" The voice that came from the front room made me freeze with my old shirt flung onto the floor and a clean one halfway over my head. "Why are you all sweaty? Is something wrong?"

It was Annabeth.

I quickly finger-combed my hair. I couldn't remember if Nico's had been sticking up or not. "What are _you_ doing here?" I asked, coming into the living room and trying to look as nonchalant as possible. Nico was really good at that. He could look like nothing was a big deal under some pretty crazy circumstances. I wasn't as good at it, though, and if Annabeth figured out something was weird she'd start asking questions.  
And I wasn't sure how I was supposed to answer them.

"There you are!" Annabeth exclaimed. She was wearing jeans and red t-shirt with the letters **SIN(x)** printed over a dotted line. Her New York Yankees cap was stuck in her left pocket. Her blonde hair was tied up in a messy ponytail, and I watched as her eyes traveled up and down my body once. "You're all sweaty too," she said, frowning. "What were you doing?"

"Moving the living room furniture," Nico said calmly, before I could even open my mouth. "Percy's mom asked us to do it while she was away." I glanced at Nico, trying to tell him I thought he was brilliant without actually saying anything out loud. The tiny grin he flashed me told me he got the point.

"Oh." Annabeth didn't sound all that convinced, but she didn't really have any evidence to suggest it wasn't true.

I took her momentary silence to start asking more questions of my own. "What is it?" I asked, stepping further into the room. "I mean, why are you here? It must be important –"

"It is." Annabeth's tone was much more serious, and her eyes flashed darker as she frowned. "We have to get to camp. Chiron needs to talk to you."

"Camp?" I knew Annabeth had stayed behind to tend to Chiron until his leg had healed, so it made sense that he might send her as a courier. But why did he need to talk to me? I wondered suddenly if it had to do with what Nico had told me about how we might beat Luke. We'd kept it to ourselves so far, talking about it in hushed whispers in the dark of my room. It was a good idea, but we'd wanted to wait until we'd been able to work out more of a plan before we thought about contacting Chiron.

Well, I thought grimly, maybe it was time to talk to Chiron about it now. "Okay," I finally said, feeling both Nico's and Annabeth's eyes on me. "Do we need to leave now?" I'd have to leave Mom a note. She'd understand. I hoped.

Annabeth made a face. "I think maybe you guys should shower first." For a minute I didn't know if she was serious, but the look on her face said she was. I guess maybe she didn't want to share a taxi with two sweaty guys.

I glanced at Nico, but he just shrugged. "I'll go first," he said, disappearing down the hall. At least he had extra clothes he could change into. He'd started keeping extras here.

In the meantime, I was left in the living room with Annabeth. I supposed that meant I was supposed to be a good host, so I asked, "Uh, do you want to sit down? We have sodas in the fridge…"

I wasn't really sure what kind of hospitality she was expecting, but it seemed okay because she nodded and said, "Yeah, sure. A Coke would be good." She followed me into the kitchen and sat at the table, looking around while I pulled a can out of the fridge for her and handed it over.

"So how long has Nico been here?" she asked. I stared at her for a minute, but then I realized that she probably wanted to know for some reason other than the reason that kept leaping to mind. There was no way she could know about us. And I got this uneasy feeling in my stomach every time I thought about telling her. I mean, I didn't know how she'd react. I can never tell how girls are going to react, but Annabeth especially had been weird about some things lately.

I shrugged and said, "A while. He's been looking for clues about his mom and stuff. We're pretty close to the library." That seemed to be enough for Annabeth, because she popped the tab on her Coke and took a swig. "How's Chiron?" I asked. Down the hall, I heard the shower start.

"He's getting better," Annabeth began. "It's been hard just convincing him to stay off that –"

"Percy?" Nico called from the bathroom. His voice sounded strained – I left Annabeth at the table and burst through the bathroom door a few seconds later. And then I stood there, staring, as he peered around the edge of the shower curtain. The water was running, and Nico was clearly standing under it. But he was still perfectly dry.

"I'm not getting wet."

I glanced back, shutting the door behind me quietly and coming over beside the tub. I put a hand on Nico's skin, but it told me the same thing my eyes had. He was dry. The water from the showerhead pattered against the back of my hand, wetting my skin and running down my hand in little rivulets.

"What's happening?" Nico asked in that same strained voice. I wasn't sure I had an answer.

Now, I was pretty familiar of the concept of not getting wet. It was one of the perks that came with being the son of Poseidon. I could choose whether or not I wanted to get wet, and I could even breathe underwater if I needed to. But I'd never heard of any other half-bloods being able to control something like that.

Nico's voice broke into my thoughts. "You can do this, can't you?"

I looked back up at him and nodded. "Well, yeah, but – "

"So how do you… you know. Get wet?"

I frowned, thinking. It was kind of hard to explain. "I just kind of… think about getting wet, and I do," I said, thinking it wasn't really much of an explanation. Nico's face went sort of blank for a minute, and then suddenly, the sound of the water hitting him changed and his hair began plastering itself to his scalp as it absorbed the spray.

Nico looked distinctly relieved. "That's never happened before."

"That's weird," I murmured, running my hand along his collarbone and collecting the drops on my fingers. "I thought only children of Poseidon could do that."

"So did I," Nico said quietly. He glanced over at me, but suddenly shifted back a step, retreating under the shower spray. "You'd better get back to Annabeth."

"Yeah." I locked gazes with him for a few more seconds, but he was right. We didn't have time to figure this out now. But that didn't mean we wouldn't talk about it later. I slipped out of the bathroom as he pulled the curtain shut again, and went back to the kitchen, wiping my wet palm on my jeans.

When I re-entered the kitchen Annabeth gave me a very interesting look. "Everything okay in there?" she asked slowly.

I tried to think fast. "Huh? Yeah – yeah, he just needed the soap. We were out," I lied, wishing I could do it as well as Nico. Annabeth gave me another look, but she didn't ask any more questions about it, to my very great relief.

When Nico finished and entered the kitchen with damp, dark hair, I took my turn in the shower while Annabeth called for a cab. The taxi ride back to camp was pretty uncomfortable, despite the fact that I was side-to-side with Nico because I'd been given the middle of the backseat. That meant my other side was pressed against Annabeth, who kept glancing over at us and frowning, then glancing out the window and frowning, and then repeated the whole process over again. We talked a little, but not much. It wasn't like we could talk about trying to save the world from a Titan army with the cabbie right there in the front, driving us.

When we finally arrived and hiked up the hill that marked the border of Camp Half-Blood, Chiron was waiting for us in his wheelchair form. He looked from me to Nico, but he only said, "Welcome back. I'm sorry to pull you away from home so soon after you left, but I have an important matter I need to discuss."

I nodded, and Annabeth took hold of Chiron's wheelchair handles and we headed back down the hill towards the Big House. I wasn't sure if I should say something, and I guess no one else was either, so we walked in silence. When we finally arrived in front of the Big House's porch, Chiron spoke at last.

"Nico," he said gently, "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I need to speak with Percy and Annabeth in private."

I felt the corners of my mouth tugging down and I wanted to protest, but Nico only shrugged. "It's fine," he said, tilting his head. "I'll just wait outside." He ambled off towards the rest of camp while I followed Annabeth and Chiron inside and into the sitting room on the first floor. Grover was waiting for us there, chewing nervously on a tin can. When he saw me he waved and grinned. I returned the gesture, sitting down on one of the big overstuffed chairs in the room while Annabeth wheeled Chiron across from us and sat down herself on the couch next to Grover, shooting me a look that I couldn't really read.

"Now that I have you all together," Chiron began, folding his hands on his lap, "there's a quest I need the three of your to undertake. I'm hoping," he smiled grimly as he looked at the three of us, "that it will be a good deal easier than your last."


	5. Chapter 4: The Prophecy

Nico was waiting for me outside the Poseidon Cabin. His hands were shoved into his pockets and he was scuffing one sneaker along the dirt path that ended at the door. He looked up as I approached, but I pointed to the cabin door. I wanted to talk to him where no one else would overhear.

He followed me in, glancing around at the clean floor and recently-made beds. The cleaning harpies had been through after I'd left camp, and the place always seemed like someone else's room when I first came back to it. Once we were inside with the door shut behind us, Nico turned and looked at me expectantly.

"We're going to visit an Oracle," I told him, thinking back on what Chiron had said. "Annabeth and Grover and me. Chiron knows where she is. He says she's known for her accuracy, and that she might be in danger. He thinks if Luke finds out about her, he'll want to capture her. So we need to get to her first." I paused. "We're supposed to leave in an hour."

I watched Nico's face as he nodded. I was getting better at reading him – or at least I thought I was. His expressions weren't as obvious as most other people's were. "Oh. Okay," was what he said, but the way the corners of his lips were tugging downward told me that he wasn't as okay about it as he sounded.

"Look, if you could come, you know –" I began, but he shook his head and cut me off.

"I know." He sighed and sat down on my bed. "I just don't like it. Something about this feels… I don't know. It's just, why you? Why do you suddenly have to go on this quest all of a sudden? It doesn't feel right. And then there's that thing with the water…"

"Yeah." Bad feelings and weird powers were usually about as likely to be nothing for a half-blood as our dreams were. Which was to say, they were worth taking seriously. I went and sat down next to him, our hands close enough to touch if either of us moved. "Do you think it's something we should tell Chiron or Mr. D about?" I hadn't seen Mr. D at the Big House, but he was probably around here somewhere.

Nico shook his head. "No. I don't think they trust me. And besides, I don't trust them either." He saw the look on my face and went on before I could protest. "Look – I know _you_ do. I just… I'm not sure about them." His mouth set into a line as he pressed his lips together. "Not the way I'm sure about you."

That felt like a punch to the gut – well, if punches to the gut could feel good. Something about what he said made me want to cancel the quest and lock the cabin door and just stay in here with Nico for the rest of the day. Except that was pretty stupid, and I knew it would never happen. So I settled for the next best thing, which was leaning over and kissing him. And the next thing I knew, he was on his back and our clothes were on the floor and I didn't think anything had ever felt more intense.

I'd been drowsing happily on top of Nico when there was a knock at the cabin door. A couple of quiet curses and groans later, I called, "Come in!" just as Nico got his right arm through the armhole of his t-shirt.

The door swung open and Annabeth stood there, blinking into the dimly lit cabin. She looked from me to Nico and back again. "… Am I interrupting something?"

"No," Nico said, glancing at me. I could tell that the nonchalance in his voice was mostly an act. "We were done." Well, I guess that was pretty true, even though the truth was also that I liked lying there with him afterwards a lot. It didn't feel like it had been an hour already.

The look on Annabeth's face was kind of weird, and I wondered if she noticed we were sweaty again. But all she did was jerk her head in the direction of the stables and motion to me. "It's time to go, Percy."

I nodded and gathered up my things. I already had a spare backpack here, sitting at the end of my bed and stuffed with a flashlight and extra t-shirts, underwear, and socks. Riptide was in my pocket like it always was, and I'd lost the shield Tyson had made for me over the summer when we'd been fighting for our lives in the Labyrinth. I flexed my shield arm, wishing I still had it with me. Just in case.

At least I didn't need too many supplies, I thought, swinging one strap over my shoulder. Chiron was hoping that we would get to the Oracle before trouble did. But I still wondered just how likely that was going to be. Somehow things never seemed to take the easy path where half-bloods were involved.

I turned to Nico as Annabeth and I left the cabin. I hoped he didn't mind too much that I was leaving him at camp. He'd be okay here, even if he didn't really trust Chiron. "I'll see you when I get back."

He nodded, following us out. I didn't blame him for not exactly wanting to stay in the Poseidon cabin alone. I was pretty sure he didn't really feel comfortable there even when I was with him. "Yeah. See you later."

Annabeth and I headed for the stables. She was walking fast. In fact, the pace was almost too fast to call it walking at all. I had to jog a few yards to catch up before I fell into step beside her. "Excited to go?" I asked, wondering if that was why she was so antsy, but the sidelong glance I got in response wasn't exactly what I'd expected.

"Not really," she said, and her pace quickened again. "But it'll be nice to be doing something, at least." Her voice sounded odd, like she wanted to say more, but she didn't.

Well, I thought, maybe she was still mad about Luke. I mean, it was pretty clear that Luke was firmly on Kronos' side. At the moment he pretty much _was_ Kronos. But every time someone mentioned that, or said something about how Luke had given himself up completely to the Titan's cause, Annabeth would go prickly. That was why I hadn't really talked to her about what had happened in the Labyrinth over the summer, and why I hadn't even thought about bringing up Nico's proposal when I'd met with Chiron earlier. Annabeth would have shot down our plan in ten seconds flat. I was sure of it.

When we arrived at the stables Chiron and Grover were already there. Grover was wearing his fake feet and his cap was tugged low over his unruly hair to hide his horns. Blackjack and two other pegasi were standing outside, saddled and ready to go. _Heya, boss!_ Blackjack pranced in place as he greeted me. _You're not gonna leave me out this time!_

I grinned and scratched his nose. "Nope, not this time. I'm sorry about that, buddy." He sorted softly into my hair, and I figured I was forgiven. Then Chiron cleared his throat and the three of us gathered around him.

"Now, I know I said this shouldn't be difficult, but I want you to be on your guard. Don't do anything that might give yourselves away. And don't go looking for trouble." He looked right at me as he said that last part. I glanced down and scuffed my foot in the dust a bit, feeling both guilty and a little unfairly accused. I guess I wasn't particularly good at keeping out of trouble, but it was usually because the trouble followed me.

He handed out thermoses of nectar and baggies of ambrosia to each of us, and we mounted. Grover needed a little help, but eventually he was seated astride his pegasus, looking nervous but ready to go. Juniper melted out of the greenery alongside the stables just as we were about to leave so that she could say good-bye.

Annabeth was the first to take to the air, with me and then Grover not far behind. Even though this wasn't exactly a pleasure ride, I loved flying on Blackjack and he knew it. He showed off with a few fancy tricks that had me hanging on for dear life before his horsey laughter echoed in my mind and the three pegasi turned their noses and wings to the west.

Rising Star, Texas, wasn't _exactly_ the middle of nowhere. But it was pretty close. From the air it was just a patchwork of squares that looked slightly greener than the brownish orange of the surrounding area. The pegasi wheeled in a wide circle until Annabeth spotted an empty field where we could land and our mounts could mingle with the herds of animals already there. Anyone who saw them would just think they were regular horses. The Mist would take care of that.

_Just give me a call when you need us again, boss,_ Blackjack told me after we'd landed. _We'll just be here having a snack._

"Thanks," I said, as the three winged horses ambled off to find some sweet grass to munch. Then Annabeth and Grover and I turned towards the town.

The Oracle's house wasn't exactly in the town – more like the outskirts. Chiron had given us a map, and Annabeth led the way, squinting in the sun before finding the right direction and setting off. Grover and I hung back a bit – Grover was mostly admiring the scenery, though occasionally he pulled at some flowers or long grass to munch on. The air smelled clean and fresh out here, nothing like it did in the city. It was nice, but I couldn't imagine living out here, with barely any neighbors in sight.

Grover and I chatted a little, mostly about how he'd been since I'd left and what had been happening with the satyrs now that Pan was dead. He told me he'd only gotten started convincing other satyrs that the task of preserving nature was up to them now. I guess it made sense. I mean, if I'd been waiting for a hero to show up all my life, and then I suddenly found out he was dead and would never come to help me, I'd be pretty reluctant to believe it too. But I had faith in Grover. If anyone could spread the word and get the satyrs to work together, it would be him.

After maybe twenty minutes of walking, the road split off onto a dusty driveway of sorts. There was a house at the end of the drive. Annabeth looked at the map, then at the dirt-track road. "I think we're here."

We walked up the drive in silence, careful to keep a lookout for any suspicious activity. But the sun was shining and there were cattle mooing off in the distance, and there was no sign of trouble as far as I could tell. The house looked like it had been through a lot. The wood of the siding was sun-bleached and the roof looked like it had been patched more than once. There was a line of laundry hanging in the yard and the windows and door were flung open to catch whatever breeze there was. The long grass in the front yard ruffled in the wind as we hiked up to the door. Annabeth got there first, knocking hesitantly on the doorframe and peering inside. "Hello?"

"In the back!" The voice that answered was a girl's voice, and sounded pretty young. There was just a hint of a Southern twang. Annabeth glanced at me and Grover. I reached into my pocket, fingers closing around my pen just in case, and nodded.

The three of us walked into the house. The front hall a braided carpet on the wooden floor and a pair of tables, each with a vase of flowers on it. It led into a dining room with a painted wooden table that was decorated with stenciled vines and roses. Next there was a kitchen, with red checkered curtains and an old white refrigerator that looked – and sounded – like it was on its last legs. The back door was open to another yard full of long grass. There was a figure with a watering can hunched just outside the doorway tending to what looked like violets.

"Hello?" Annabeth asked again, as the three of us crowded around the back door.

The figure looked up at the sound of her voice, and smiled warmly. She looked young, maybe twenty-five or so. Her face was pale, with a spattering of freckles across her nose, and she had brown hair tied up in a messy ponytail. She was wearing overalls with a white t-shirt and red Converse sneakers.

She stood, setting the watering can down and dusting her hands off on her thighs. "I was wondering if you'd make it in time."

I wondered what exactly that meant, but Annabeth spoke again before I could ask. "Are you the Oracle?" she asked uncertainly.

The brown-haired girl smiled down at us. I noticed her lips were a rosy shade of pink, which stood out against her freckled cheeks. "That's me. Chiron sent you, didn't he?"

"Yes," Annabeth said slowly, though I could tell by her voice that she was starting to relax just a little. This did seem pretty straightforward. I mean, Chiron had told us the Oracle would probably know we were coming, and he didn't think she'd have any reason to turn us away. And she wouldn't be on Kronos' side. He had been very sure of that.

"Are you really an Oracle?" Grover asked, shifting in his fake shoes. He was looking at her with wide eyes, like he couldn't believe that she could be the same as the Oracle at camp. I definitely understood where he was coming from. Technically I'd never seen a live Oracle before either. The one at camp lived in the mummified corpse of some hippie lady that never moved, the one time it had decided to take a walk in the woods notwithstanding. But this one was definitely alive and breathing.

And laughing, I realized, as she chuckled politely at Grover's question. "Yes, little satyr, I am." Then she winked. "I'm a bit older than I look, I admit. But not all of us have chosen to appear in such a morbid form as Delphi."

Grover blushed a little, but the Oracle only kept smiling. Then she turned to Annabeth and me. "You've all traveled a long way to get here. I have some iced tea in the fridge. Why don't you come inside and we can sit down and talk." She started to lead the way back inside, but as she walked past she glanced over at me.

"Percy. I think I'd like to talk to you later."

"… Uh. Yeah, okay." I got a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach, and not just because she knew my name without asking. I mean, whenever I'd talked to an Oracle before, it had been to get a prophecy. And those weren't usually good things. But maybe I was overreacting. Maybe it was something else completely.

Annabeth looked a little unnerved too, but we all followed the Oracle into the kitchen and were given glasses of iced tea. We sat around her table under a white ceiling fan that turned lazily but still managed to make a nice breeze in the room.

We must have talked for a long time – an hour or more, probably. By then it was clear that what Chiron had believed was true. The Oracle wasn't planning on joining Kronos, and Luke hadn't found her yet. "I don't really want to leave, but it is safest, I suppose," she said, swirling the ice in her third glass of tea so that it clinked against the sides. "I would rather die than see him rise to power. I know what will happen if he does."

She looked up at the three of us, then back down again. I shifted in my chair, feeling uncomfortable. She was nice, sure, and she was on our side, which made me feel a whole lot better. But there was something about the way she talked and the look in her eyes that bothered me. It made me think of something morbid, but maybe that was just because she was an Oracle and she was old, no matter what she looked like now. I hoped that was just it.

"I'll help you for as long as I can. I know that –" She stopped short, looking up again at us with wide brown eyes. "Oh, no. They're already here. But it's too soon –"

At the same time, I heard something off in the distance. It was a sort of whine, that started out soft but got louder and louder until suddenly I could identify it. Motorcycles. It was the sound of motorcycles, and they were getting closer.

Annabeth stood so fast she knocked over her chair. She pulled her knife from her bag and looked around like she was assessing the defensibility of the Oracle's house. Her mouth set into a thin line, and after a minute she said, "We have to go. We need to get you back to camp."

After that, everything happened too fast. The motorcycle noise grew until it was nearly unbearable – they were in the yard now, and seconds later two _dracaenae_ burst through the open door. I yanked Riptide out of my pocket, uncapping it and stepping back to come shoulder to shoulder with Annabeth.

She and I formed a line, side-by-side in front of Grover and the Oracle, who were still on the other side of the table. Grover was tugging the sleeve of her t-shirt, trying to get her out the back way while I called frantically for Blackjack in my mind. But just as Grover had gotten the Oracle turned, a shadow appeared in the back doorway. There was a snap and a whistling noise, and Grover suddenly let out a yelp. I spun around to see that a girl had managed to get in the back way. She looked human, so she must be a half-blood. She had dark hair and a red leather jacket, and an empty bow in her right hand.

And sagging in Grover's arms was the Oracle, a red-fletched arrow lodged deep in her chest. "No!" I kicked at one of the _dracaenae_, sending her skidding across the room on her snake-trunk legs. The other one let out an angry cry and slashed at Annabeth, but she parried and ducked out of the way.

"We're done here!" the enemy half-blood cried, and before I'd done anything more than spin on my heel to grab for her, she was racing out the door and into the yard. The two _dracaenae_ retreated out the front door and the motorcycle engines flared to life a few seconds later.

I wasn't going to let them get away with what they'd done. But I'd only gotten three steps towards the door, when Annabeth's frantic voice made me stop. "Percy!"

I turned back towards her as the sounds of the motorcycles faded into the distance. Grover and Annabeth had laid the Oracle on the floor. Annabeth had one hand on the arrow shaft, and her face was so pale it was nearly white. There was a large red stain spreading across the front of the Oracle's overalls, and there was blood all over her hands and Grover's shirt as well.

"I can't… I don't think I should… Oh, gods," Annabeth was saying, her eyes wide as she looked down at the place where the arrow had penetrated. Then she looked up at me. "Percy, what do we _do_?"

I didn't know what to do either – the Oracle looked pretty bad, and there was this weird gurgling sound every time her chest heaved. Grover was trying to keep her steady, but his hands were shaking and his skin was almost as pale as Annabeth's.

My body and mind felt strangely numb as I plodded clumsily over to them, Riptide almost falling from my fingers as I stared down. She was dying. The Oracle was dying. I just knew it. And there was nothing we could do.

"Don't – don't worry," she rasped, but the words only made Annabeth look even more panicked. "It's supposed to be this way. I knew my time was coming. You – " She coughed, and there was blood on her lips. I couldn't do anything but stand there dumbly, watching her die.

And then the Oracle looked right at me. "You. Perseus Jackson," she said, but the way she said it, it didn't sound like her normal voice. "You must listen – " For a minute her eyes seemed like they were drilling through my skull and into my soul.

But before I could say anything, her eyes clouded over. Green mist began pouring from her mouth. Annabeth gasped, pulling her hands back. Grover stared. The mist wrapped around the chairs and the table, then curled up and around my legs. And then the Oracle spoke.

_"Your plan he does not dare allow,  
He seeks the one left disavowed.  
When lover's touch has since grown cold,  
You must repeat failed quest of old.  
They gods are not lightly defied,  
But one may yet come to your side.  
Baser than blood the two have shared,  
The only way to be prepared.  
Put your trust in unheard steps,  
If you would bring love back from Hades' depths."_

Her voice faded, and the mist faded with it, almost like it was melting away. And as it disappeared I felt a tugging in the pit of my stomach, almost like the sensation I felt when I called on water to do my will. But this feeling chilled me to the bone. And I knew with absolute certainty that she was gone.

"She's dead," I said out loud, my voice sounding hollow in the silence after her words. "The Oracle is dead." As if to confirm it, the Oracle's body suddenly turned to dust and crumbled away. The arrow clattered to the floor. Grover jumped.

For a minute Annabeth just stared at the film of dust on her hands. I thought I saw a tear or two run down her cheek, but then she lifted one hand and scrubbed them away. "Dead…" she echoed. "We failed. Chiron was wrong. Kronos didn't want her on his side. He just wanted her dead."

"He must have known she'd never cooperate," I said, slowly re-capping Riptide and replacing it in my pocket. The movement felt incredibly slow, like I was moving my arm through syrup.

"But… what about the prophecy? I mean, she did just give Percy a prophecy, didn't she?" Grover asked nervously. He pushed himself up off the floor and looked from Annabeth's face to mine. "What did all that mean?"

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. The words echoed in my mind like they were on replay, but for a minute I couldn't make heads or tails of them. Annabeth stood too, and I realized that she and Grover were now looking at each other with strange expressions on their faces. "I think it Grover's right. It was a prophesy," Annabeth agreed, frowning. "But I don't get it either. Lover's touch gone cold?"

Grover shivered. "It sounds like it has something to do with death. And she said something about Hades." He looked at me. "I don't get it. Was that what she wanted to talk to you about? Maybe it was just because Nico's been hanging – "

Whatever he said next was totally lost on me. Suddenly I felt like the floor had dropped out from under me. The words replayed in my mind one more time, but now I understood exactly what they meant. For a minute I didn't know if I could explain it… but then suddenly I could. "The gods – the line about the gods." I shook my head. It felt like I couldn't get enough air, like my lungs were only half-inflating every time I took a breath.

"Percy?" Annabeth and Grover must have noticed I wasn't listening anymore. "Percy," Annabeth said again, more sharply, and my eyes focused on her even though I felt sick to my stomach. "What do you know that we don't?"

"'The gods themselves are not lightly defied.'" I moaned – it made sense, it made so much sense. "Hades – he already tried to – " My whole body froze at the realization of what the rest of the words meant. Because I was pretty sure she'd been talking about Nico.

I'd never thought about what we were in words before. But that's what he was, wasn't he? My lover. But in Hades – dead. My hands felt numb. My stomach felt like it was filled with lead. I wasn't sure if I was breathing.

_Nico._ Something was going to happen to Nico.

I closed my eyes for a minute, but this wasn't a dream. I wasn't going to wake up. And if we didn't get back to camp, Nico might –

I opened my eyes. "She was talking about Nico," I said, still feeling dizzy and sick and a million other things I couldn't name. "We have to get back to camp. Something's going to happen to Nico."

Annabeth opened her mouth, probably to ask how I knew that, but just then Blackjack and the other two pegasi came pounding up into the yard. _Boss! We came as fast as we could! Some farmer thought we were part of his herd and we couldn't get away!_ He shook his head, then looked at the tracks the motorcycles had left in the yard. _What happened? Are you okay, boss?_

It only took a split second for my reflexes to kick into gear. I was on Blackjack's back before I realized my feet were moving. "We have to get back to camp. _Now_."


	6. Chapter 5: Like Pieces Of A Puzzle

I leaned over Blackjack's neck, trying to urge him faster. It had taken two days of pretty solid flying to get to Rising Star, but I didn't think my nerves would last another two days. And Nico might not either. That thought made me flatten even more against the stallion's back, trying to reduce the wind resistance as much as possible.

I would've ridden all night and into the next day until we got there, if Blackjack hadn't started faltering under me. But as it was, I suddenly realized that we were descending. "Wha…?"

_Sorry, boss. We gotta rest for a little while. We weren't ready to turn around and go right back,_ Blackjack told me apologetically. We were heading for a little clearing in some foothills where it looked like we could stop without anyone noticing us. I guessed we might be someplace in West Virginia. We'd been following what looked like mountains up to the north and east for a while.

"… Oh," I said slowly. "Yeah." I didn't want to admit it, but he was right. Flying our mounts to foundering wouldn't do Nico any good. But every time I thought about him sitting around alone at camp, I heard the Oracle's words about death and my stomach would suddenly fill with acid all over again. I'd spent most of the ride feeling sick.

When Blackjack landed I slid off his back and waited nervously for the others to land. We'd flown in silence ever since we left Rising Star. It was pretty hard to talk with the wind whistling in your ears, so it was a pretty good excuse. But now we weren't flying anymore. And as Annabeth and Grover dismounted I could practically feel their gazes boring a hole thought the back of my head.

For a long minute nobody said anything. My own thoughts zipping around in my head sounded way too loud. I had two options. I could either tell them what was going on, or I could play dumb. But this was Annabeth and Grover. I guessed they were pretty much my two best friends ever. They deserved to know, right? And if they thought it was gross, then… Well, I didn't know what I would do.

I turned around, not quite looking at either of them. "Look, I –"

"I've already figured it out," Annabeth said, cutting me off. I stared at her, my mouth still open. She just kept going. "I'm not dumb, Percy. And neither is Grover, you know."

Grover just shuffled his fake feet a bit, glancing at me from underneath his shaggy brown bangs. "We have that empathic link," he finally said. "I mean, it's not like I can spy on you or anything. You know that. But the first time I felt something weird, I…" His cheeks turned kind of red. "Well, then Annabeth mentioned it to me. You could've just told us."

I just stood there with my mouth hanging open. I was probably going to start catching flies. Or mosquitoes.

"Stop acting like it was _sooooo_ secret!" Annabeth huffed, pushing past me to sit down on a nearby rock. The sun was just starting to set and everything around us was tinted with orange, including her hair. It looked a little like flames, framing her face. "You should've told us!"

I finally managed to get my mouth closed. Annabeth was glaring at me now, and Grover just looked uncomfortable. I was pretty sure they expected an apology, because that was pretty much what I wanted to give them. "I'm sorry," I said, glancing at each of them in turn. "I just… I didn't know how you'd, you know, take it, exactly."

"Well you could've given us the benefit of the doubt!" Annabeth said, crossing her arms. "Instead of making me figure it out on my own!"

I wasn't exactly sure how that meant she was taking it, but I didn't know if she wanted to talk anymore. Grover didn't look mad, at least. Just a little embarrassed. I turned to him instead. "Look, man. I didn't really get the chance to talk to you anyway, so…"

He shrugged, glancing down at the grass beneath his sneakers. "Don't worry about it. I guess I didn't really get the chance to tell you about Juniper ahead of time either, right? So we're even." He offered me a small grin, but tilted his head in the direction of Annabeth.

I guessed that meant resolving things now. I turned back to her. "Look. Annabeth. I really was going to tell you." That was pretty much the best I could offer her. "And – look, we've got worse things to worry about right now. I don't even know if he's going to be all r–"

Suddenly the tugging feeling was back. It was like when the Oracle had died, only probably a million times worse. I felt like someone had just sunk a hook into my stomach and pulled it out through my belly button.

The next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground. Annabeth and Grover were both leaning over me. They looked worried. I blinked, groaning, and tried to move my arms and legs. They felt like stone. I felt like I was going to throw up. But that was nothing compared to what I felt like on the inside.

"Percy!" Annabeth reached down, taking hold of my arm. "Percy you – ah!" She pulled her hand away, staring at it. Then she looked at my arm. "Percy, you're cold as ice. What happened? Are you okay?"

"You just went white and fell over," Grover said, his brow furrowed and his hat askew. "You didn't even make any noise."

Most of what they were saying registered, but it didn't matter. None of it mattered. I guess my face must have been blank, or they'd expected a response or something. Annabeth reached out again and shook me. "Percy! Percy, can you hear me?"

"Nico," I managed to croak, staring at my friends with wide eyes. "It's Nico – he's dead."

Annabeth frowned. "What? You can't know that, Percy." But she looked even more worried as she and Grover helped me to sit up.

I shook my head. She didn't understand. "But I do. I know." I knew that as certainly as I knew my own name.

And I didn't know what to do about it. Or how I felt about it, except for empty. I felt horribly empty. I mean, he'd been my friend for at least a year and a half now. And I guess we hadn't been, well, doing whatever we'd been doing for very long, but it had started to feel so right that I'd kind of started to take it for granted. Just because you know something can't last forever doesn't mean you don't start to convince yourself otherwise. I mean, especially when you're fifteen.

What were you supposed to do when someone like that died? I felt sick to my stomach again. I wanted this feeling to be wrong. I didn't want to know with such certainty that Nico was dead. But I did know, and I wanted to lie down and go to sleep and never wake up. I wanted to cry or scream or something. Anything.

"He looks kind of sick," Grover whispered to Annabeth.

"I _feel_ sick," I said loudly. Grover jumped, like he hadn't thought I would be able to hear him. I swallowed, trying to tell my stomach to calm down. Throwing up wasn't going to help anything right now.

After a minute, Annabeth spoke. "Percy," she asked quietly, "how do you know Nico's dead?"

"I felt it," I tried to explain. "It was like… I just knew. I don't know. I wish I was wrong." I swallowed. There was a lump in my throat that made it hard to talk. "But I just know I'm not."

She frowned, then turned to Grover. "Can you ask the pegasi if they're rested enough yet?" she asked.

"I can do it," I croaked, trying to push myself to my feet. It was harder than I thought it would be. It was like my body really did just want to lie down and sleep. It would be so easy to do just that…

But I couldn't. I had to know what had happened. I had to see with my own eyes, to confirm that this feeling was right. And then I would decide what to do after that. Maybe it was wrong. Maybe I really was crazy and Nico was just fine. But the only way to know anything was to get back to camp.

Blackjack and the others had wanted to rest for longer, but he took one look at me and immediately shifted his weight to make it easier for me to mount. He glanced worriedly back at me once I was mounted, but all he said was, _We'll get you back as fast as we can, boss._ And then he leaped into the air, with Annabeth and Grover right behind us.

I honestly don't remember the rest of the ride back. All I knew was that the pegasi got us back in only three-quarters of the time it had taken to get us to the Oracle.

As soon as we circled the camp from the air I knew something was wrong. The field around the Big House was in ruins. The grass was scorched and the ground looked like it had been dug up and thrown around by an angry giant with a shovel. Near the Big House, in a line near the front door, there was a jagged, broken wall of black rock that hadn't been before. Part of the ground near the rock wall was sunken, and the hole had filled with muddy water. I heard Annabeth gasp, "What happened?" as we neared for a landing, but I didn't have any kind of answer for her.

I practically fell off of Blackjack as he hit the ground, prancing in the dirt. I stumbled once but kept running, heading for the door of the Big House. Nico. I had to find Nico. I knew there was no way the feeling in my stomach could be wrong, but until I saw with my own eyes, I still had this wild hope that maybe it was. I scrambled over the rocks, sliding down the face of them and just barely landing on my feet.

Before I could get to the door, it opened to reveal Chiron. His face was dark and drawn. My heart felt like it had stopped, then started again, and I almost staggered as I ran the last few yards to the porch. I opened my mouth to ask about Nico but he spoke before I could get a word out.

"Percy," he began. His voice was calm, but I could tell it was a fake calm. Annabeth and Grover pounded up behind me, having gone the long way around the rocks. Chiron looked from me to Annabeth to Grover. I opened my mouth to ask again, but this time Annabeth beat me to it.

"What happened here?" Annabeth asked, a little out of breath. "It looks like there's been an earthquake!"

"Come inside," he said, stepping back into the house. I wanted to ask him about Nico _now_, but Annabeth and Grover glanced at me and before I knew it they'd swept me inside. We went to the same room we'd been in before, where Chiron had first given us our quest.

I couldn't be quiet any longer. As soon as the door was closed I burst out, "Where's Nico?" Chiron looked at me again, and the look on his face told me everything I needed to know. "He's dead," I heard myself say, my voice sounding hollow even to me. "He really is dead."

I'd known he was dead before. I'd known it for a day, but somehow it still hadn't seemed completely real until just now. I felt myself stagger, and Chiron took my shoulder in his strong grip and led me over to one of the couches. I sat down. Annabeth and Grover were looking worried again.

"It was Kronos' doing. He sent assassins. We didn't realize they were after Nico specifically until it was too late," Chiron said, his hand still on my shoulder.

"What – what happened to him? Where's his body? I want to see him." My throat felt like it was closing up and my eyes stung, but I was not going to cry. Not in front of Chiron and Annabeth and Grover.

"We've already disposed of his body," Chiron said quietly. "It seemed the best course of action. I'm sorry," he said, speaking to all three of us.

I tried to picture what Nico's funeral pyre must have looked like, but it just seemed all wrong, burning his body like it wasn't important anymore.

"What about the Oracle?" Chiron asked, using my silence to ask about our quest. "You're back much sooner than I expected.

"She's dead," Annabeth said quietly. "We were ambushed by two _dracaenae_ and a half-blood. She had a bow – she shot the Oracle. We tried – " She stopped, biting her lip, like she still felt guilty for what had happened. We all did.

Chiron nodded gravely. "I'm glad you three are safe, at least. And we know that she cannot turn on us." It was pretty small consolation, I thought.

"She wouldn't have, anyway," I said quietly. "I know she wouldn't have."

"And then Percy – he said – " Annabeth went on, glancing at me again, "He said that we needed to get back here because Nico was in danger."

"He said he knew Nico was dead," Grover said.

That got Chiron's attention. "You knew he was dead?" I nodded dumbly. He sighed. "Then perhaps things aren't as disconnected as I first thought." I frowned. I didn't know what he meant by that at all. How was anything connected? And where were we supposed to go from here?

"Percy," Chiron finally said after a moment, "I have some questions for you. About Nico, and the night you felt him die."

To my right, Annabeth coughed a little and Chiron looked at her. "He… he already told us a little," she said quietly, glancing at me like she was afraid I wouldn't want her to tell my secret for me. But I didn't care. It wasn't like it really mattered anymore. When I didn't say anything, she went on. "Percy and Nico were… well. You know. Seeing each other."

It had been a lot more than just _"seeing each other"_, but it wasn't like that mattered now. We could never do it again, I thought miserably.

Chiron sighed. "That does make a certain amount of sense. Nico managed to divert nearly half the lake during the battle. There wasn't much other explanation."

"But there's no way he could do that!" Grover protested, shuffling nervously as he wrung his hat in distress. "Percy's the only one who can use water like that."

"Nico made the wall of rock, didn't he?" Annabeth asked. She was obviously trying to make some sense of the situation. And we'd seen him do something like that before, on Mount Othrys.

"Oh, the rock is his doing, too," Chiron said wryly, but he was still looking at me. "The rock and the sunken ground, I'd expected. But not the lake."

I stared at him, feeling like I was supposed to answer some sort of question that he hadn't even asked. I didn't know what he expected me to say. I didn't know how Nico could have possibly done that.

But suddenly I realized that wasn't the only trick of mine he'd picked up. This kind of thing had happened before. The day we left for camp, he hadn't gotten wet in the shower. That was something I could do, too. I'd been planning to talk to him about it, but we'd never gotten the chance. And now we never would. But the question was still, _how_?

"Percy, there are very few ways for half-bloods to acquire powers not their own," Chiron finally said, breaking me out of my thoughts. "Usually it involves the exchange of blood. I need to know, did you two exchange blood somehow?"

I shook my head, frowning. "No."

Chiron's brow furrowed. I thought again about what he'd said – there were "very few" ways. That meant more than one. Were the others even weirder than blood? We hadn't done anything that weird.

"… Percy," Annabeth suddenly spoke up. Her voice sounded strange. "You guys didn't… you know." She paled. "Did you?"

She hadn't said it, but I knew what she meant anyway. "Uh." I could feel my face start to turn red. I mean, having sex with another guy wasn't exactly something I'd have put on the top of my list of things I wanted to talk to Annabeth about. Actually, I wouldn't have put it on the bottom, either. It wouldn't have made the list at all. Especially not when you added in the fact that not only was Annabeth in the room, but Chiron and Grover too, and now all three of them were looking at me. And I didn't see why that was important, exactly. There hadn't been any blood.

She apparently took that as a yes. "Think about it," she said, glancing from me to Chiron and back again. "You haven't shared blood, but…" Annabeth's face was still pale. "You have shared," she swallowed, "something, right? Something more basic than blood. I guess you could call it the essence of life itself."

I frowned. Well, when she put it like that…

"That's what the Oracle said," Grover put in. "Something 'baser than blood', right?"

"Right," Annabeth said. "And something about being prepared."

"She gave you a prophecy?" Chiron interrupted, his face suddenly much more concerned, if that could happen.

"She gave Percy one, anyway," Grover said, picking up a doily that was sitting on one of the tables and taking a bite out of it. "We didn't understand most of it. Something about Hades, and the gods being angry."

"'The gods are not lightly defied'," Annabeth quoted, looking distinctly more worried. "Percy, you said that Hades did something, didn't you?"

Chiron moved so that his whole figure was pretty much all I could see. Then he bent down so that his face was right in front of mine. He looked very serious – more serious than I remembered seeing him look in a very long time. "Percy," he said quietly, "I think you'd better start at the beginning."


	7. Chapter 6: Much Too High A Cost

Chiron listened without much comment. Annabeth kept making small noises, but she didn't say anything. She just kept giving me looks that were mostly worried, except for when they were obviously disapproving. I tried to ignore her, which actually wasn't too hard with Grover shuffling around the room and eating doilies and whatever else he could find sitting around that I hoped Mr. D. wouldn't miss too much. It was pretty weird describing everything in, well, detail, but I figured if I didn't do it now Chiron would probably ask questions about it later. So I sat there and tried not to squirm and I talked until I ran out of things to say.

I'd never thought of talking as particularly tiring, but by the time I got to what had happened yesterday in the woods I was pretty exhausted. I felt like I'd been talking for hours. When I got to the part about feeling Nico die, my stomach felt cold and I had to blink a lot because my eyes kept stinging. Nico being dead seemed more real every time I said the words, and I just felt worse and worse every time I thought about it. I realized just how much I'd been looking forward to seeing him when I got back. And now I couldn't even see his body, because they'd already burned it. I wondered if he'd even gotten a proper funeral shroud. Who would've made it for him? I hoped it wasn't the Ares kids.

When I finally stopped talking and slumped down in my seat a little, Chiron nodded and stroked his beard with a thoughtful look. "That does explain a lot, really," he finally said with a sigh. "You two had started to become sensitive to each other's realms of influence because of the nature of your relationship. That was why Nico had the ability to control water as you do, and why you seem to have become sensitive to death." I nodded slowly, remembering now how Nico had said that he knew whether people were dead or not. I'd never thought about how he'd known, but now I understood because I knew it too.

"Wait," Annabeth said, looking at Chiron, her expression suddenly strange. "If all that can happen because Percy and Nico… uh, you know," she flushed a little, "then what about… other half-bloods? Like if a boy and a girl…?" She did have a point. How come this didn't happen every time two heroes, you know, got together? Maybe it did… or maybe it was just that half-bloods didn't usually live long enough to get together very often.

"Ah, but there's a difference," Chiron said, raising a finger and seemingly oblivious to Annabeth's obvious discomfort. "When a male and a female couple, there is not the, ah, mutual exchange of fluids, as in Percy and Nico's case."

Now it was my turn to feel some obvious discomfort. "Wait, so you're saying that the whole power thing, it's just when guys… do it?"

Chiron nodded. "It was not uncommon among the Greeks for men to take male partners, of course. But it was discouraged among half-bloods for that very reason. The exchange of abilities can make the heroes involved in such a coupling much more powerful – and possibly much more dangerous." I could see how the gods might not like that. Not with the whole _I could be the one to either save Olympus or destroy it_ prophecy already hanging over my head. And besides, it could've applied to Nico as well – we were both kids of the Big Three. Suddenly I was pretty surprised we'd gone unnoticed for as long as we had.

Grover nodded. "So that's what the oracle meant when she said the gods weren't thrilled about it. It sounds like Hades was just getting a head start." He glanced at me and I got the feeling he was probably remembering our first quest together, when we'd gone into the Underworld because we'd thought Hades had stolen Zeus's master lightning bolt. Our audience with him then hadn't gone so well, either. "Hades doesn't like you much anyway."

I shrugged. "Well, I don't really like him much either."

"That's as may be," Chiron said quietly, looking at me as though examining me for physical defects, "but you have a part of him inside you now, through Nico. You can already sense death, at least when it's near you. You may be able to affect other aspects of it as well – whether this is good or bad, I don't yet know, but we must proceed carefully." I guess he had a point – I didn't exactly think that Hades would be thrilled if I had death powers.

"Proceed?" Grover asked, coming over beside me, his hat in his hands as he twisted it like he wanted to wrench it in two. "What do you mean? I mean… the oracle is dead. Nico – " He swallowed and glanced at me. "Nico's dead. What do we do now?"

That was the question, wasn't it? _What do we do now?_ What was I supposed to do, now that he was gone?

"Tell me again what the oracle said," Chiron said. "As exactly as you can."

Annabeth immediately cleared her throat and began to recite, but Chiron stopped her after the first sentence. "She mentioned a plan – Percy, were you and Nico planning something?"

I swallowed. "Well… yeah," I admitted. "I mean, that was why he showed up at my window in the first place." Or, at least, why he'd said he had. "He had an idea, a way we might be able to beat Luke – I mean, Kronos." Annabeth looked sharply at me, like she was mad at me for not saying anything to her. I didn't exactly want to tell her it was because every time I mentioned Luke she got all defensive. It wasn't my fault the guy was a traitor, but sometimes I felt like maybe she thought it was.

Now Chiron looked very interested. "I see," he said, and I could feel not only his eyes on me, but Annabeth's and Grover's as well. "And you two were… working on this plan?"

I nodded, feeling suddenly just as self-conscious as when I'd been talking about everything Nico and I had done. "Yeah… I mean, we were just talking about it. It's not much. We were going to tell you when it was, you know, more than just a couple of ideas."

"I see," Chiron said again, but now he was frowning. "Well, it's obvious this plan must hold merit, because it's apparently the reason Kronos sent his assassins here for Nico."

My stomach suddenly felt cold again. Could that have been the reason? It suddenly made a lot of sense – why else would they come after Nico now? They hadn't ever come after him over the summer when he'd stayed here, or even when we'd been at my mom's apartment. But I hadn't thought anyone would know about our plan. We'd only talked about it in whispers in my room. How could Kronos have found out about it when we'd barely started to figure it out ourselves?

"So… what _was_ your plan?" Annabeth asked, voicing the obvious question. "If it was so important, maybe you'd better tell us."

Chiron nodded in agreement. I sighed, already feeling like I'd run a marathon just from having told them everything about me and Nico earlier. But I had a feeling I wasn't going to be able to get some rest until I'd told Chiron about our plan. So I took a deep breath and started talking. We hadn't really gotten far on it, but the most important part of it was something Nico had sensed. It was something none of us could have known without powers like his.

Nico had said that Luke was dying. He could feel it – Kronos was leeching the life out of Luke's body and soon he would burn out like a candle. Then Kronos would be left with a dead body and no Luke. He'd have to switch to a different body. And he'd be vulnerable in that instant.

But of course that meant Luke was going to die. In fact, Nico's plan kind of depended upon it. Annabeth looked pretty stricken as soon as I said it. I knew she still cared about Luke a lot, even if he was a traitor. I couldn't say I really understood. The guy had tried to kill me more times than just about anyone else, and even though I got what Hermes had said about being family I knew I still would've killed him if I ever got the chance. But even if I admitted that I would've killed him in a fight, this was something different. If Kronos had his way Luke would just go out like a candle. That didn't seem right somehow. Not even for someone like Luke.

Chiron was nodding again. "I had suspected," he murmured, glancing at Annabeth before he looked back to me. "I suppose it is good to have confirmation, though the news is grim."

"Yeah," I said, feeling pretty grim myself. There was a lot more Nico had wanted to do, too. He wanted to recruit all of the dead heroes in the Underworld to help us. He had been pretty sure he could do that… But then I realized that I was thinking like Nico was still alive to do all that stuff. And he wasn't – which meant that most of this plan was shot to, well, Hades.

And there were a lot of other factors, too. If Kronos got himself a new body – an _immortal_ body – and we couldn't stop him in time, things would go from bad to worse in an instant. The clock was ticking, and nobody knew how much time we had left. Sure, Chiron's prophecy said I would be sixteen when I had to choose between the gods or the titans. But I knew that wasn't really much comfort. A lot of things could get pretty bad before the potential end of the world became an issue.

"It is a weakness we could exploit," Chiron finally admitted, stroking his beard a bit. "And any weakness is worth considering, given the alternative." Annabeth was biting her lip; she looked pale but she nodded. Grover was watching Chiron with dark eyes. "I will give it some thought," Chiron finally announced. "Even without Nico, perhaps some sort of variation on –"

"What about Percy?" Grover interrupted, looking at me. "Can you feel Luke's life force and tell how much time we have left? I mean…" he flushed a little, "since you have some of Nico's powers now."

I shook my head. "No, I don't think so. I can't feel anything like that." I didn't want to admit that it was horrible enough to just feel people die. It was like a punch to the gut with a spiked glove every time. A spiked glove coated with poison, even. I didn't know how Nico could stand it – _could've stood it_, my mind corrected miserably. He didn't have to stand it any more.

But the point was I didn't want to be able to feel somebody's life burning out. And unless there was some special ritual that Nico had done to feel it, then at least I could rest assured I wasn't going to, either. I didn't feel a thing.

Chiron's lips were pressed together, making a thin line across his face. "We'll have to work around our limitations if we intend to carry out this plan," he said quietly. "I do think it holds merit, given the cost at which…" He trailed off, looking at me like he was silently trying to tell me he was sorry. It didn't help much, but I guess it was better than nothing to hear him pretty much say that Nico hadn't died for nothing. Because he hadn't. He was a hero.

He changed the subject by asking about the rest of the prophecy. Annabeth recited the rest as he listened silently. "Most of it makes sense," Annabeth mused when she was done, frowning in that way that she did whenever she was faced with a puzzle and not enough information to solve it. "But there's the part about repeating a quest…"

"A failed quest of old, in particular," Chiron said as he considered the oracle's words. He was looking at me with this weird expression, like he wasn't sure if he should say more because I was going to take whatever he said the wrong way.

Of course, that only made me want to know what he knew even more. After all, he knew everything I knew by now, wasn't I entitled to the same? I hated it when he looked at me that way. "What is it?" I asked, probably sounding a little more demanding than I meant to. "What do you know about it?"

He sighed. "Well, there is a certain quest that comes to mind, given the context of the prophecy. But you must understand – listen to the words, Percy. _Failed_ quest of old – there's a reason it failed. This sort of quest is always doomed from the start. You yourself have attempted it, and failed to save what mattered most, if you recall."

I stared at him a minute as his words sank in, trying to make sense out of what the oracle had said. Grover looked nervously around the room, biting his bottom lip like he wanted to pick up one of the figurines on the nearby end table and start munching on it. Annabeth suddenly looked very concerned, frowning at me and shaking her head. Chiron was still looking at me with that weird expression that said he knew something I didn't and he didn't like what it was.

But suddenly everything was becoming clear. _Failed to save what mattered most_ – I knew very well what that meant. "I know what I have to do," I said, looking right at Chiron. Why hadn't I thought of it before? "I have to go down into the Underworld and get him back."

Annabeth shook her head so fast her blonde hair whipped around and hit me on the shoulder. "Percy, you can't – you heard what Chiron said! It hasn't worked before – you've tried it and failed. Even Orpheus failed, and he actually got Hades to _agree_ to let him try. You can't do it."

I'd heard about Orpheus before. He was kind of like an ancient Greek pop star who had gone into the Underworld to ask Hades to give him back his girlfriend, Eurydice. He sang a song that was so sad that even Hades cried and finally said he could have Eurydice back. But the catch was that he couldn't look back to see if she was following him until they were all the way out of the Underworld. I guess he got antsy or thought that maybe Hades had lied to him or something, because he was almost out when he'd looked back. Eurydice _had_ been following him, but the deal was broken and she disappeared as soon as he saw her. There was no way Hades would have given him a second chance.

I frowned. Annabeth didn't understand. Sure, some guy with a lyre had failed, but that wasn't me. And maybe the last time I'd tried something like this before it had failed, but that was years ago. I had a little bit of the Underworld inside of me now. How could I possibly be better prepared to succeed at a quest like this than having apparently acquired at least limited death powers of my own? That was better than a good signing voice any day.

"I have to do it," I told her. I was as serious about this as I had ever been about anything in my life. My stomach felt funny. Could I really do it? Could I really get Nico back? It didn't matter what anyone else thought. I knew I had to try.

"Does that mean we have to go on another quest?" Grover asked hollowly and I glanced at him, feeling bad. I knew that he didn't really like quests, especially when they involved being underground.

"I'm going," I said. "I mean, the prophecy says I have to. I can do it this time. The oracle knew it." I wasn't positive of that, but why would she tell me to repeat a quest if I was going to fail it?

"If the oracle could see all that, why couldn't she see what was going to happen to her?" Annabeth countered quickly, frowning. I knew she didn't like the idea of me going down into the Underworld, but I didn't care. It wasn't her decision. "She said something about it being too soon. That means she knew about the attack, didn't it? Then she could've prevented…"

But Chiron was shaking his head sadly. "Oracles cannot see their own deaths clearly. They may get visions of the events leading up to their demise, but they do not know the time or place they will occur. It seems she had some idea of what was going to happen, but not _when_ it was going to happen." He turned to me. "Percy, you must promise me – promise you will not attempt anything until we have thought this through." Chiron looked down at me and suddenly I felt like one of those kids who has to be put on suicide watch or something. "I need to know that you will still be here in the morning."

I won't lie – most of me wanted to go after Nico right then. I didn't care about what Chiron or Annabeth thought about how hopeless it was. I could do this with or without their support. But I was exhausted after everything that had happened, and Grover was looking at me with a pleading look in his eyes as he continued to wring his hat. Somehow I knew that waiting another day wouldn't matter enough in the long run. Nico would still be there in the Underworld. So I sighed and nodded, looking at my dusty sneakers and the faded carpet covering the floor. "Yeah. I'll be here in the morning," I said.

"Good," Chiron said, with an air of finality that ended the discussion for now. "I think we all need some rest. We'll talk about this again in the morning." He glanced out the window, where the sun was starting to set over the strawberry fields. "It should be about time for dinner. Why don't you all get something to eat – you must be famished."

I probably should have been hungry, but my stomach still felt like it was full of frozen lead and I didn't think I could eat anything. All the same, it was easier to let Annabeth and Grover drag me towards the dining pavilion than to put up much of a fight. If I at least made some attempt to eat something, they'd probably be more likely to leave me alone after dinner so I could think. As we made our way down the steps of the Big House's porch the conch shell sounded over the campgrounds, marking the start of dinner. The campers who were year-rounders – a lot more than there had been before, I was pretty sure – began filing out of their cabins and towards the open-air tables of the pavilion.

Annabeth and Grover left me at the empty Poseidon table with worried looks as they went off to their own respective tables to eat. Mr. D wasn't at his usual place, but I supposed that wasn't so unusual as of late. Things were getting down to the wire – everyone felt it. Kronos was going to make his move, and soon. There wasn't a lot of time for luxuries anymore.

The naiads who served our meals left a big platter of barbecue in front of me, but even the smell of A-1 wafting from the plate couldn't convince my stomach to be hungry. I joined the line of campers at the fire pit in the center to make my customary offering to the gods, but suddenly I wasn't sure how much it meant anymore. I mean, from what the Oracle and Chiron had said, none of the gods were likely to be on my side. I wondered for the hundredth time what my dad thought about all this – was Hades really right? Was Poseidon angry with me? Did he hate Nico? How was I supposed to convince anyone that we had just wanted to be left alone?

I scraped most of the meat on my plate into the fire, staring at the flames as the meat burned and smoked. "Please be on my side," I whispered into the fire.

Nothing happened. I tried to convince myself that while that might be worse than a good sign, it was better than a bad one. I went back to my table and picked at the rest of the food on my plate, trying to ignore the looks and whispers I was getting from the other campers. I stared at the rest of my brisket bitterly and wondered if word had gotten around yet that I was gay. That I'd had a boyfriend. That he had been the son of Hades, who didn't even have a cabin here at camp. That he was dead now, and it was probably what he deserved.

I didn't have to wonder for long. "Hey, Percy!" boomed a taunting voice from the Ares table. I didn't have to look up to know it came from Clarisse. "I think your mom was a little off when she named you! She should've called you Nancy instead!"

There were snickers and wolf-whistles from the other campers at her table. I just glared at my plate and wished that being the son of the Sea God came with the power to make people's heads explode with my brain. There were a couple of other jokes that I was fuming too much to really hear, and then Silena Beauregard at the Aphrodite table got the bright idea to counter on my behalf with some spiel on how love was beautiful and knew no bounds, not even gender. That only made the Ares kids laugh louder, and I could feel my face burning as I stared at my plate. I wished that I could at least use Nico's power to open the ground so that I could sink down into it and die. I already felt pretty lousy, given everything that had happened. I didn't need the Aphrodite kids trying to defend me to the Ares kids about how love was beautiful and was supposed to conquer all. Because obviously it didn't or Nico wouldn't be dead and I wouldn't be stuck here when there was a way I could go and save him.

So instead I just sat there and moved the food around on my plate and thought about how much I didn't particularly want it. I thought about Nico and how he _could_ open up the earth when he wanted to. I looked over and saw the jagged line where he had opened the ground to swallow a legion of skeleton soldiers two years ago. And I began to wonder – if Nico could divert the lake, then maybe I could do other things he could do, like…

An idea suddenly popped into my head. I went back to my food with more enthusiasm this time, moving things around a little more and making a show of forcing at least a few bits of barbecued brisket down. Then I got up and went for seconds. I slapped a couple of big pieces of meat on my plate, then went back to the table and managed to get a little more of my dinner down. Then I made a big show of "accidentally" dropping the remainder in my lap, while what I was really doing was stuffing as much brisket into the pockets of my jeans as I could manage. It wasn't very sanitary, but I figured it didn't need to be for what I was planning.

I pulled my shirt down as far as it could go, getting sauce all over it in the process, but at least that would probably mask the meat juice that was starting to leak through my pockets. Some of the other campers – mostly the Ares cabin – snickered but I ignored them and stood.

I headed straight for cabin number three. Once I was inside I pulled the meat out of my pockets and changed clothes as fast as I could. I chucked my old clothes in the laundry bin as the smell of steak sauce permeated the whole cabin, almost overpowering the sea salt smell coming from the fountain bubbling in the corner.

I sat on my bed. Now all I had to do was wait until dark.


	8. Chapter 7: Let The Dead Speak

As I sat there and tried to figure out the rest of my plan, I realized that Nico's Stygian iron sword was propped just inside the doorway. I wondered how it had gotten there – he wouldn't have left it if he'd fought with Kronos' assassins. Someone else must have left it there afterwards. I couldn't imagine why, but all the same just looking at it made me feel a little better, somehow. And a little more determined, too.

I got up and went over to where it was leaning against the doorframe. The blade looked cold and dead – well, as cold and dead as a blade can look, I guess. I reached out to touch it. The hilt was cold as ice, but I wrapped my fingers around it and hefted it experimentally. It was much heavier than it looked and its balance was completely different than Anaklusmos'. I swung it a few times and watched the blade arc through the air, adjusting my grip on the hilt until it felt better in my hand.

Night finally fell and the sounds outside the cabin died down as everyone settled in for the night. I waited for a good hour after everything had gone quiet before I gathered up my dinner leftovers and Nico's sword and snuck out the cabin door as quietly as I could. Curfew was still in effect even though the summer session was over and I didn't want to be a Harpy snack. But I ran into no one and nothing as I made my way down the sloping hill to the woods. I ended up at the creek, mostly because even though I'd nearly been killed there more than once I still felt somehow connected to the place. A lot of important things had happened near here. And besides, the water would give me strength. I figured I could use all the help I could get.

I took Nico's sword and began scraping away at the ground in front of me. It wasn't exactly a shovel, but it would have to do. After about half an hour's hard work I was sweaty and dusty but I had a decently deep furrow gouged out of the ground. I figured that would have to be good enough. I was ready to begin.

I didn't exactly have McDonald's, but I did have the brisket I'd brought from dinner. Barbecue would be just as good as Big Macs, wouldn't it? I didn't have anything to drink, but I guessed I could probably get some water from the creek if the dead wanted beverages with their meal. I took a step back and put one foot into the water for good measure. Then I chucked the meat into the ground.

"Let the dead taste again," I said, echoing the words I had heard Nico speak last year when I'd seen him do this in an Iris message. My voice sounded loud in the still night air. "Let them rise and take this offering. Let them remember."

I remembered that when Nico had done this he'd also said something in Ancient Greek. I hadn't heard most of what he'd been saying – stuff about memories and returning from the grave was all I remembered. So I just made some stuff up and started talking, babbling about how if the dead could still remember their lives then they could remember what it was like to help people. I said something about how they could have this yummy meal of barbecue if they'd just come up out of their graves and help me. It probably wasn't as morbid as what he'd said. I hoped it would be good enough.

When I finally ran out of stuff to say, I stopped. All around me the woods were deadly silent (no pun intended). I could barely hear the creek burbling in its bed, and I was standing right in it.

Then, suddenly, there was a scratching sound. The sound grew louder and the hole I'd dug started bubbling up with what looked like coffee-colored A-1 sauce. Figures started to appear in front of me among the trees – only a few, maybe five or six in all, but they were still there. I'd managed to summon the dead with my leftover dinner and some cheesy lines about helping me from beyond the grave.

I wasn't sure which scared me more – the dead people in front of me or the fact that I'd actually managed to bring them here. I hefted Nico's sword and plunged it into the ground in front of me. "I want to talk to Nico!"

"He can't come," said a voice behind me. I turned so fast I nearly lost my balance, blinking as I saw the shadowy white figure standing there as it swayed in the wind. Or, at least, it looked like it was swaying in the wind. I couldn't feel any wind. After a moment it seemed to materialize and grow more solid in front of me until I suddenly knew who it was.

It was Bianca di Angelo. She smiled. "Hello, Percy."

I swallowed. "Bianca. Hey." I suddenly wasn't sure what to say – I hadn't talked to her for two years, which I guess made sense when you considered the fact that she was dead. She'd been killed two summers ago, fried inside a giant robot in the junkyard of the gods. But then there was also the fact that she'd been the one who'd been leading me to Nico last year, even _though_ she was dead. When you really thought about it, dead people got around quite a bit, for being dead.

I just stared at her for a minute until my brain finally kicked into gear and I could think clearly again. There was a reason I was standing here offering a bunch of dead people leftover barbecue, after all. Then I suddenly had a million questions for her. "Why can't he come? He's… he's dead, isn't he?"

She nodded, her eyes never leaving my face. "Yes. But he won't even talk to me. Something's wrong with him."

I frowned. Something was wrong with Nico on top of his being dead? This wasn't good. Somehow everything felt more urgent. Nico needed saving, that much was clear. And of course I was going to be the one to do it. That pretty much matched what the Oracle had told me – that I would repeat a failed quest. I hoped that meant that this time it would succeed. I mean, the rest of the prophecy had sounded pretty promising, right? I just had to trust…

"Bianca, I'm going to rescue him," I said. The relief on her face was visible even on her half-transparent features. I hoped that was a good sign. "Can you help me?"

But she shook her head, and my stomach felt like it had fallen through the creekbed below me. "No," she said grimly. "I can't. There's nothing I can do from here."

I felt my fingers curl into a fist – why did it seem like everything in the universe was against me on this one? Chiron and my friends thought going on a quest to save Nico was a bad idea, the Oracle had said that all the gods hated me and I definitely knew she was right when it came to Hades. And if Bianca couldn't help, then it was going to be up to me. Alone. And I didn't want to admit it, but I didn't know if I could do this one alone.

I suddenly grew aware that I didn't have a lot of time here. Bianca was more solid than the other figures crouching at the hole in the ground behind me, but she was still transparent and starting to fade. I guessed that just because I had some of Nico's powers didn't mean they were very strong. I needed to get as much out of this as I could, because I wasn't sure I was going to get a second chance.

"Bianca," I said, my mind racing frantically, "if you can't help me, then do you know anyone who can?"

Bianca's face grew hopeful for a second, and my heart leapt. Maybe there was someone who could help! But then her face fell, and she said, "Yes, but she's… not here right now." She glanced around, like she was looking at the trees. "What month is it?"

I blinked. What month? "September," I said, wondering if maybe they didn't have calendars in the Underworld. I supposed the passage of time didn't exactly matter much down there.

Bianca didn't look pleased with my answer. "It's still too early. November, maybe…"

My throat felt dry. _November_? I didn't want to have to wait until November to save Nico. That was two months away! And what if something happened in the meantime? What if Kronos attacked? He could attack tomorrow, for all I knew.

"Why is it too early?" I asked, wondering what the month could possibly have to do with things. But Bianca only shook her head and looked around again.

"Percy… I have to go." I realized she was beginning to fade faster. I glanced behind me, and realized the other spirits that had come to feast on the leftover barbecue were gone, or nearly gone. I looked back to Bianca, my mouth opening to plead with her. But she spoke before I could get a word out. "You shouldn't try this again," she said, and smiled sadly. "It's too dangerous. I'll try to get you help, but…"

I didn't know if she had more to say, but she faded out before I could ask and I was left facing nothing but the dark shadows of the trees. I got the feeling that even if I did try again, I wasn't going to get any response.

I went back to my cabin, feeling uneasy and sick to my stomach. What was I going to do? I couldn't just leave camp, but I definitely couldn't stay. If I didn't do something soon, Chiron would find a way to keep me here and Nico would… I swallowed. Nico would stay dead. And I didn't want to think about that. I'd been hoping I would be able to talk to him tonight. Maybe I could've told him I was coming and we could've formulated a plan. But he hadn't come, and Bianca hadn't been able to help.

To say I was disappointed would be a pretty big understatement. I didn't think I'd be able to fall asleep, but I figured I should try. Even if I was going to go on a quest to rescue Nico, it wouldn't be tonight. I sat on my bed, still wearing my dirty jeans and sneakers. I felt grimy and sweaty; the air was still hot and sticky outside, and I'd gotten dirt pretty much all over me trying to dig that trench. I don't even remember lying down, but I guess I must've because before I knew it I was asleep.

That night I dreamed of pomegranate trees on the beach.

I don't know how I knew they were pomegranate trees – I mean, I'd seen pomegranates before, but I didn't know what the plants they grew on looked like. Besides, I'd always thought they were too much work to eat. Mom would get them sometimes, but you had to cut them open and then eat the stuff around the seeds and spit the seeds out unless you really wanted to eat those too. It was more work than eating a watermelon. And they were expensive, so we didn't get them a lot.

So there was no good reason that I would have a dream about pomegranate trees, especially not when they were growing on a beach. I didn't think pomegranate trees grew on beaches. But that was where I found myself, wandering down the waterline with the sand squelching in between my toes and pomegranate trees on either side of me.

As I walked by one of the trees, a piece of fruit fell from it and rolled across the sand to hit my foot and come to a stop. I bent down, picking it up. The fruit was cold – ice cold – and it almost burned my hand to touch it. I hissed, dropping it, and when I looked up again, I stumbled back in surprise.

There was a woman standing in front of me. She had long dark hair and pale skin, and she looked sad. There was something about her expression that made me think of prisoner who'd been trapped so long that they no longer thought about escape. I opened my mouth to speak to her, but she only shook her head and pointed out to sea. I frowned. I wanted to ask her who she was, but it seemed like my voice wouldn't work.

She reached down and picked up the pomegranate, smiling sadly and holding it out for me to take. I reached for it before I could stop myself, but when I touched the fruit again, it was warm. I looked back up, but she was gone –

I woke up just as the sun was starting to rise. I couldn't have gotten more than a couple of hours of sleep, but I wasn't tired enough to try for more. I still felt pretty gross, though, so I dragged myself out of bed and found some clean clothes and started heading for the showers. It was light out by now, so the harpies wouldn't try to eat me for being out of my cabin.

But as I made my way towards the showers, I thought I heard something rustle in the trees. I stopped, wondering if it was one of the nymphs or something, but no one appeared. Figuring it was just my mind playing tricks, I turned back to the path and went on my way, but then there was another rustle and the sound of someone calling my name.

"Percy."

I stopped again, staring at the trees.

"Percy Jackson."

Well, if there's one thing I've learned from being a Half-Blood, when someone knows your name it's either really good or really bad. I was already reaching for Riptide in my pocket when the trees rustled a third time and out stepped a woman I'd never seen before.

But suddenly I realized I _had_ seen her before. She was the woman from my dream! I'd only jst managed to open my mouth when she raised a hand and spoke first.

"Percy Jackson. I must speak with you." I nodded. When someone steps out of the woods and speaks to you like that, you kind of have to agree. "Do you know who I am?"

I was about to say no when I thought about my dream again. She'd been on the beach with all the pomegranate trees –

Wait a second. _Pomegranate trees_. Suddenly I did know who she was. I swallowed. "You're… you're Persephone, right?" I paused. "Ma'am." I mean, if she was, she was Queen of the Underworld. I figured that probably at least deserved a ma'am. I didn't want to get on her bad side.

She smiled. "Yes, I am. But I am not a queen right now." She looked over at the trees, then at the sky. "It isn't winter yet. That is why I am able to come to you here."

Suddenly what Bianca had said the other night made sense too. If it wasn't winter, Persephone wouldn't be in the Underworld, and Bianca wouldn't have been able to ask her for help. But then how had she known to come? "But Bianca said…"

"Bianca might not have been able to contact me, but others have," she explained, though I guess it wasn't really much of an explanation at all. I wasn't sure anyone else I knew would've contacted someone like Persephone on my behalf. I mean, most of the gods weren't too fond of me, and I still didn't even know how my own father felt about my relationship. Or whatever it was.

"You know what you must do, if you want him back," she continued, her dark eyes watching me carefully.

Apparently she wasn't one for beating around the bush. I swallowed and nodded. "I have to go and get him back. Right?"

But there were so many problems with that plan it was hard to begin to think of how to deal with them. For starters, how was I even supposed to get to Los Angeles from here? The last two times I'd gone to the west coast it had been… well, it had been quite an ordeal, let me put it that way. I didn't want to have to go through any of that again – don't get me wrong. I would if I had to. But that didn't mean I was looking forward to it. I'd barely made it to California alive the last two times. And even if my goal was the Underworld, I was pretty sure I had to be _alive_ if I was going to walk out of there again when I found Nico.

And even if I could get there in one piece, somehow I got the feeling that if I was going to get to the Underworld I couldn't just waltz in and ask Charon for another ride. Sure, I supposed if you thought about it you could say he was on my side. Or, well, I was on his side. Or at least, I'd pretended I was. But I still didn't know if that would exactly buy me any kind of favor with him a second time. I didn't think so.

What I wanted was to ask Annabeth or Grover for ideas – they'd know what to do – but I felt like if I did that they would only try to discourage me from even going. How was I supposed to do this when all my friends thought it was a bad idea? I didn't think I'd ever felt more alone in all my life. At least when I hadn't had any friends, they couldn't have made me feel this way.

"My husband has only ever agreed to relinquish one subject. And I do not think he wishes to repeat that incident," she said. I wasn't sure if that was supposed to comfort me or not, because it definitely didn't. She smiled again, but it was a sad smile. "I would do what I could, but I don't think you have the time to wait for winter. You need to go now."

Well at least there was one thing we agreed on. "There is another way, Percy Jackson," she said. "A way that you might find easier than most." She paused and glanced to the side, like she was worried we were being watched. "There is another entrance to the Underworld," she said slowly, turning back to me. "It wasn't always underwater, but it has come to rest there over the centuries. The mortals call it the Puerto Rico Trench." She paused, making sure I understood. "Find that, and you just may find your way in."

My stomach felt like it was suddenly full of butterflies. Another way in? Underwater? That was definitely something I could do – it was practically an invitation. All I would have to do would be to find a way to this Puerto Rico trench. And all I would have to do to find _it_ would be to step into the water. I'd found out two years ago that once I was on the water, I could tell exactly where I was in relation to everything else. It came in pretty handy, I had to admit.

"Take this, too," she said, as a pomegranate appeared in her hand. "Remember, some supplies are best used before the journey begins." She threw the pomegranate to me, and the fruit arced gently through the air to land squarely in my hand.

"Thank you, but – " I looked up to ask he what she meant by that, but it was too late. She was gone. And the only way I knew she'd ever been here was the piece of bright red fruit in my right hand.

"'One may yet come to your side.' Huh. Never thought you'd catch the eye of Persephone, Seaweed Brain."

I whipped around, nearly dropping my towel and the pomegranate in surprise. Standing there just behind me, pulling her invisibility cap off of her head, was Annabeth.


	9. Chapter 8: Gifts

I stood there staring with my mouth open for a minute. Annabeth, who was already looking pretty smug, took the opportunity to laugh and roll her eyes. "Close your mouth, Percy," she said, folding her arms over her chest. "And before you ask, yes, I heard the whole thing. And no, I'm not going to try to stop you."

I clutched at the towel and pomegranate in my arms, eyeing Annabeth and turning what she'd just said over in my mind. My first reaction was panic that she'd heard everything, but confusion came right behind that. "You're not?" But just yesterday, she hadn't sounded at all thrilled to let me go haring off into the Underworld, with or without her. "But yesterday…"

She shook her head, ponytail whipping from side to side. "I thought about it. A lot, actually." She sighed. "I was up almost all night. I wrote down everything the Oracle said, and I went over and over it. It… kind of sounded like she wanted you to do it." She glanced off to the side, biting her lip for a moment. "And I guess I kind of do, too."

Okay, now I was really confused. "What?" Why would Annabeth actually _want_ me to do this? Well, I mean, aside from the fact that she's really not a bad person. It wasn't like she hated Nico or anything, I reasoned. But it was just such a major change from how she'd been acting before that I was still having trouble believing it.

She sighed again, looking a bit impatient as she looked back at me. "Look, Percy…" Her cheeks started turning red, and I fought the urge to take a step back. I mean, whenever a girl starts to blush, it's never a good sign. Never. "I liked you. A lot, you know? I guess I was just kind of… you know, jealous." She glanced off to the side again, like studying the cabins off in the distance was much more interesting than looking at me. "But I guess I just had to get over it. I can tell you really like Nico." She looked back again, and there was determination in her grey eyes. I'd seen that kind of determination before. It wasn't something you wanted to contradict. "So if you like him so much," she said, "then I don't think I should be stopping you from going and getting him back if you really stand a chance."

She paused. "Percy," she asked quietly, and her gaze became even more intense, "you _do_ stand a chance. Don't you?"

I admit that for a minute there I was struck speechless. I mean, having Annabeth confess that she liked me and that she was jealous, and then go right on to say that she thought I should go get Nico back was a little much to take in all at once. I could feel my own face turning kind of red – I mean, before Nico had confessed to me, I admit that I'd kind of thought Annabeth was pretty cute. A heck of a lot of trouble, sure, but pretty cute too. That time she kissed me underneath the volcano had been pretty intense, even if it was just a quick peck on the lips. And it wasn't like I didn't still think she was cute… She just wasn't Nico. So what did that make me?

I shook my head a little to clear it. I might still think Annabeth was cute, but somewhere in the pit of my stomach I knew that I thought Nico was beautiful. I mean, not in some cheesy sort of guy model sort of way. It was different. He was _special_ in a way that made me feel lightheaded and warm every time I spent time with him. It was kind of like drinking too much nectar too fast. He just made things… better.

But that didn't mean Annabeth wasn't my friend, and it didn't mean that I could ignore her help. Finally bringing myself back to the here and now, I swallowed and looked at the pomegranate in my hand. The Oracle had said I needed to do this. Bianca had asked for my help. And now Persephone had given me a way in. Add on top of that Annabeth's sudden support, and… "Yeah," I said, my voice almost cracking. I coughed a little and nodded, trying again. "Yeah, I really think I do."

That seemed to be enough for Annabeth. She nodded, her grey eyes still determined, and pointed to the bathrooms. "Then go get cleaned up. Meet me back at your cabin when you're done." And then she turned around and strode off in the other direction, heading back towards the U of cabins where no one else was stirring yet.

I walked the rest of the way to the showers without thinking much. I wrapped the pomegranate in my t-shirt and set it to the side with my towel and the rest of my clothes so they wouldn't get wet. It wasn't until I stepped under the shower spray that my brain seemed to start up again, at a million miles an hour.

So much had happened in the past twelve hours that I barely knew where to start. I placed my hands against the cold tile of the shower stall and let the water run down my back, energizing me and washing away the grime of the past couple days. So much had changed.

It looked like Persephone was the god who had come to my side. I felt relieved to know that _someone_ thought I was doing the right thing. And I was a lot closer to being able to reach Nico than I had been even last night. If there really was an entrance to the Underworld that was accessible from the ocean, it was a nearly perfect opportunity. I knew what I had to do, and now it looked like I had the means to do it. There wasn't anything holding me back.

But I had to admit that part of me almost felt a little disappointed, too. I'd kind of hoped it would be my dad who would come over to my side. I mean, his support would've meant a lot right about now. I still didn't even know how he felt about me and Nico. Maybe he didn't even know. Or maybe he didn't care. Not caring was better than being angry about it, right? I didn't know what would happen if he was angry about it. If Chiron was right and the gods weren't going to like this, I didn't know what I was going to do without my father's support. But I would think of something, I told myself. I wouldn't let them keep us apart.

And then there was Annabeth. I didn't know what she was planning, but something told me that she wasn't going to go to Chiron with this. I didn't know what she could be thinking, but I guessed I was about to find out pretty soon. The water was starting to run cold, and although it didn't bother me I took that as a sign that I couldn't hide out in the shower anymore. It was time to go see what Annabeth was going to do to help.

I dried off and got changed pretty quickly, gathering up my old clothes and the towel and the pomegranate in my arms. The fruit was room-temperature, not freezing like it had been last night in my dream. It smelled ripe and sweet.

As I approached the cabins, I saw Annabeth perched on the step that led up to the door of the Poseidon cabin. There was a backpack at her feet and she had Daedelus' laptop open on her lap, the blue D symbol bright against the sleek silver lid. She looked up as I approached and stood, shutting the laptop and holding it under one arm. She picked up the backpack by one strap with the other hand and waited for me to open the cabin door so she could follow me in. She sat down on my bed, setting the laptop down beside her and looked up at me.

"Okay, I got you some supplies," she indicated the backpack she'd leaned at the foot of the bed, "and I've been doing some research. Daedelus didn't have much on the Underworld that we don't already know, though. We can't be sure if there really is an entrance in the Puerto Rico Trench or not."

I blinked, staring at first the backpack, then Annabeth. She looked up, frowning. "What?"

I shook my head quickly. "Nothing! I guess I just didn't know how, uh, committed you were to helping me." I felt bad as soon as I'd said it. "I mean, thanks, though. Thanks for getting me supplies and… you know."

She rolled her eyes, sighing, like she couldn't believe I hadn't figured it out. "I'm your _friend_, Seaweed Brain. Just because I think you're going on one of the least intelligent quests of the millennium doesn't mean I'm going to let you go unprepared."

"… So you're not coming with me, then," I said slowly. I mean, I'd kind of assumed I would be going it alone from the beginning. I didn't know whether I was relieved or disappointed that I might actually be doing just that.

She shook her head. "I can't, Percy. I think this is something you have to do alone." She paused, then smirked. "Besides, someone's going to have to keep things under control here until you get back. Chiron won't be too happy when he finds out you left, and Grover – "

"Grover isn't as dumb as he looks," came a voice from the doorway; we both turned to see that Grover had managed to open the door a crack and was peering through it at the two of us, silhouetted in the early morning light. "I figured something was probably up." He stepped quickly into the cabin, shutting the door behind him. He looked over at me. "So you're going?"

I nodded. "Yeah."

"Then take this," Grover said, holding out small and flat – his reed pipes. He pressed them into my hands before I could protest.

I stared at the instrument in my hand, speechless. Finally I got my voice working again. "Thanks, man… but I can't play these." I looked up.

Grover shrugged. "Neither can I," he admitted ruefully – which was only partly true. He could play them, just not… _well_. He only knew a couple of songs: YMCA, some Barry Manilow songs, and Hilary Duff's So Yesterday. But I didn't know any songs. I didn't know exactly what I was supposed to do with them, but he kept talking like he knew I was going to argue. "Look, I don't know, I just… I have this feeling. Like you should have them. So just hang onto them for me for a while, okay? It's not like I'll need them to help spread the word about Pan."

I looked at him for a good long minute, then swallowed and nodded, putting the pipes safely in my pocket. "Yeah, man. Sure." I really didn't know if they were going to do me any good at all, but I guessed if Grover felt like they were, it would probably be better not to argue. Maybe he thought they'd bring me good luck or something. I could use all the good luck I could get.

Grover started to nod back, but then he paused, sniffing the air. "Do you smell pomegranates in here?" He looked around, sniffing again. "They're just barely in season – "

Annabeth and I exchanged looks, and then she dug the fruit out of the cocoon of my clothing on the bed, holding it up for him to see. "Persephone gave it to him."

Grover looked from the fruit in Annabeth's hand to me. "Persephone? The Queen of the Dead? Percy –"

"She said it would help me," I explained, even though the look on Grover's face had suddenly started to worry me. "What? You don't look all that thrilled."

Grover's mouth had tugged down into a deep frown. "You do know why she has to go to the Underworld six months out of every year, don't you?"

"Yeah, because she ate…" I trailed off. That was right – Persephone was bound to live half the year in the Underworld with Hades because while she was there, she'd eaten six pomegranate seeds. So she now had to spend one month there every year for each seed she'd eaten. I looked over at the fruit in Annabeth's hand too, my stomach suddenly roiling. "But then why would she… you don't think she wants me to be trapped down there too, do you?" I caught Annabeth's eyes. "You heard her too, didn't it sound like she wanted to help me?"

She nodded slowly, glancing over at Grover. "It did sound like she was sincere." She paused. "But we do know that the gods certainly aren't above deception."

I frowned, shaking my head. "No," I said, as much to convince my friends as to convince myself. "She wanted to help, I'm sure of it."

Annabeth bit her lip, still looking at the pomegranate in her hand. "She said… she said that 'some supplies are best used before the journey begins.' What if… " She looked back up at me, understanding suddenly dawning on her face. "Percy, I think she wanted you to eat it _before_ you left."

"Before I left? But why…?"

"That's definitely it – I'm sure of it now!" Annabeth exclaimed, jumping up off the bed. Grover and I glanced at each other, waiting for her to explain. "Think about it," she said. "If eating the fruit of the Underworld when you're _in_ the Underworld keeps you there, then maybe eating the fruit of the living world before you go will keep you… I don't know, rooted to here somehow. That must be it!" She offered me the pomegranate. I guessed it made a certain amount of sense. Well, as much as anything like this could make sense. The idea of something keeping me tethered to the living world did make me feel a whole lot better about this quest.

Grover didn't look fully convinced, but he didn't look quite as skeptical as he had before, either. He reached over and took the fruit, sniffing it carefully. "It smells all right…" he muttered, turning it over in his hands. Finally he gave it back to me, turning to Annabeth. "You really think that's it?"

Annabeth nodded excitedly. "It must be! I'm with Percy on this one – I think she was genuinely trying to help. And as long as he eats it here, and doesn't eat anything in the Underworld –" she glanced at me meaningfully, "then it should work like I said." She paused, then repeated, "Nothing, Percy. You can't eat _anything_ while you're down there, no matter how hungry you get. I mean it."

I nodded, staring at the bright red sphere resting in my palm. I understood – I definitely had no desire to be trapped in the Underworld the way Persephone had been. Not for a couple of pomegranate seeds, not for ten Big Mac meals with super-sized cokes. I was going to get Nico and get _out_ of there.

Annabeth pulled something out of her pocket – her celestial bronze knife, and handed it to me hilt first. "Then go ahead and eat it. Then we'll go over what we know, and you can be out of here before breakfast."


	10. Chapter 9: Into the Darkness

I cut apart and ate the pomegranate while the three of us sat in a circle on the floor and tried to come up with a plan. Grover's nose had twitched as I started eating the seeds, so I'd held out a handful to him. He'd started to reach for them, but had stopped and pulled his hand back. He shook his head. "No, I think it's just for you. I couldn't," he said. I didn't think Persephone would mind, but if Grover wasn't willing to take the chance, neither was I.

Annabeth had gone over what she could remember of the prophecy. She claimed she might not have remembered it right, but if you've ever talked to Annabeth, you know that she's sharper than most. Her memory is pretty good. I was pretty sure she'd gotten it right. We tried to comb it for clues, but in the end the only information we could get out of it was that I was somehow prepared to do this, thanks to what I'd "shared" with Nico, and that I would have to bring him back from the Underworld. There was nothing else that we could use.

I didn't want to admit it, but I was worried. I didn't exactly have a plan. The idea had been just to waltz in there, grab Nico, and pull him out again. But the more I thought about it, the more I was sure that wasn't going to work. Hades already didn't like me. And something was wrong with Nico. It was clear that I had to get him out. But I didn't know how I was going to do it.

Of course, that wasn't about to stop me from trying. As I licked the last of the pomegranate juice off my fingers ("Ew, Percy, get a napkin!" Annabeth said, making a face), I decided that I was just going to have to wing it. I didn't care. I was going in there and I was going to get Nico back. No matter what.

I pulled my feet underneath me and stood. Annabeth and Grover looked up at me, but before they could ask what I was doing I reached over and grabbed the backpack Annabeth had brought by one of the straps. "Look, we're not going to get anything else out of the prophecy. I have to leave." It getting later; breakfast would start soon, and if I wasn't gone by then, I probably wouldn't be able to leave for another day. Chiron would want to see me, or something else would come up. I didn't want to delay my departure any more.

Annabeth frowned and snapped the laptop shut as Grover struggled to his feet. She pulled herself up using the bedspread and looked me over like she was appraising me for sale or something. Finally she sighed. "You're right. I just wish we had some kind of plan or something. I don't like the idea of you just going off without any idea of how to do this."

I shrugged. "I've done it often enough." I tried to offer her a grin. It was true, after all. Most of the time we just made things up as we went. So this time just wouldn't be any different. That wasn't so bad, was it? I looked from Annabeth to Grover. They both looked worried, but it didn't seem like they were going to try to argue me into staying. They both knew I had to go now, too.

Nico's sword was still by the door. I couldn't remember if I'd put it there last night or if I'd dropped it on the floor in my exhaustion. Maybe Annabeth had put it there. I grabbed it once more, the hilt feeling cold and firm in my hand. I swore to myself that I would see that Nico got it back. I didn't want to carry it in my hands the whole way, but thankfully with a little bit of finagling I managed to get it though my belt in a position where it wouldn't cut up my jeans or my leg.

The three of us walked down toward the beach. The other campers were just starting to stir – no one was outside their cabin yet, thank the gods, but I could hear loud voices coming from the Ares cabin and a couple of faint strains of lyre music coming from Apollo's. It wasn't hard to make it to the edge of camp unnoticed, but I knew we wouldn't have long.

Annabeth bit her lip. "Good luck, Percy." She gave me a quick hug before stepping back. Her expression was serious, but that wasn't so unusual for Annabeth.

I nodded. "I will." I glanced over at Grover, who was looking equally as serious, shifting his weight back and forth on his hooves. He tried to smile.

"Good luck," he said. "We'll keep things under control here."

"Thanks." I looked at the both of them, their faces grim in the early morning light as we stood on the beach at the edge of Camp Half-Blood. "Really, guys. Thanks." I took a deep breath. "I'll be back as soon as I can."

And I turned and walked into the waves. I knew my dad would know the second I set foot in the ocean. I could only hope he wouldn't try to stop me. Maybe, I thought, he might even try to help me. I turned and waved goodbye to Annabeth and Grover before I slid beneath the surface. They both waved back, but I could tell from the looks on their faces that they were still really worried. I promised them silently that I would be back as soon as I could. The shorter this quest, the better. I didn't much envy them, having to deal with Chiron.

Of course, I told myself, I _had_ kept my promise. I'd still been at camp in the morning. I just hadn't stayed _past _morning. He'd understand when I came back with Nico.

Now, walking underwater isn't really much of a problem for me. Especially here, where the beach slid down into the ocean at a gentle slope so that the light from the surface made it pretty easy to see. I didn't even really feel cold – I mean, the water was definitely chilly against my skin, but it was kind of like being wrapped in a cold blanket. Much better than actually being _wet_ with cold water.

I immediately turned to the south. Now that I was in the water I knew exactly where I was and exactly how to get to the Puerto Rico Trench. More specifically, I knew I was headed for Milwaukee Deep, 19°35'N, 066°30'W, 84 miles north of the coast of Puerto Rico. Suddenly my very first problem became instantly apparent. I couldn't very well walk all the way to the Puerto Rico Trench. It was much too far to reach on foot, and even if I swam it wouldn't be much faster.

I walked for at least an hour, mulling through various scenarios in my head. I'm not much of a strategist and I definitely don't tend to think things out ahead of time. That's Annabeth's strength; I'm more of a spur of the moment sort of guy. But right now it was clear that I needed a plan, and the first thing that meant was finding some kind of transportation. But it wasn't like I could magically call up a submarine or anything. I might be the son of the Sea God but that didn't mean I could do the impossible.

By now the light from the surface was a dim, murky glow above my head somewhere. I was pretty deep, off the coast of New York. I could see all right even without the light from the surface, though it was pretty creepy down here with only the mud and the sea life for company. I wasn't sure any of the local wildlife would be exactly willing to help, and the water was still too polluted for any naiads or nymphs to live here. I'd exhausted all my other options. After trying to think of various ways around it, I'd only been able to come up with one solution.

So I stopped where I was and prayed. _Dad_, I said silently, closing my eyes, _I know you might not be proud of me right now. I guess you probably don't like the idea that I'm gay, because I wasn't really sure about it myself until just a little while ago. But Nico is important, Dad. He's important to me, and he's important to a lot of other people too. He might help us win this thing. He's on our side. I need help. Please._

Silence. A pair of blue sharks swam lazily past, not bothering to give me a second glance. I sighed, watching a few bubbles form and start their journey towards the surface. I had just about resigned myself to the fact that I really was going to have to walk all the way to Puerto Rico when I heard it.

There was a sound drifting toward me on the current. It sounded like something large was moving in my direction. I tensed, my fingers flexing and reaching into my pocket for Anaklusmos. I didn't know what could be down here or how dangerous it could be. I could only hope that the water would give me enough of a fighting advantage.

But just as quickly I became aware that I wasn't going to have to fight. Coming toward me, drawing closer with every stroke of its powerful tail, was a hippocampus – a sea horse, with the body of a white horse on top and a long, silvery fish tail on bottom.

I grinned, my racing heart immediately slowing as the hippocampus pulled up in front of me and made a sort of underwater whinnying sound. Here was my ride to the Trench. I reached out a hand and stroked the white nose. _Thank you, Dad_, I said silently, climbing onto the hippocampus's back and tangling my hands in its mane. He shook his head a little once and then took off toward the south with me clinging to his back.

We traveled most of the day, as near as I could figure. My orange plastic wristwatch from Wal-Mart was only rated for 165 feet and we were far deeper than that. The last time I'd tried the light nothing had happened. I guessed I would probably have to get a new one when I got back. _If _I got back.

I tried not to think about that. I tried to think about what it would be like to have Nico again. That thought kept me distracted enough for most of the journey, so that it didn't seem like it had been nearly long enough when the hippocampus made one of his bubbly whinnies and stopped. My underwater sense of direction told me we were close – less than five nautical miles. I couldn't see anything yet, though. The water was dark and murky and even I could feel it pressing on me like it wanted to crush me if it could only get the chance.

_What is it?_ I tried to ask with my mind, but he either didn't want to answer me or couldn't. Something was bothering him, and that made me uneasy too. We were pretty far down – almost 28,000 feet down, in fact. We were near the deepest point in the Atlantic Ocean. It wasn't much farther to my destination, but something had the hippocampus clearly spooked.

Then I heard what could only be described as a roar. Underwater, the sound shook my bones and rumbled through my stomach like I was standing right next to a speaker with the bass turned up way too loud. The hippocampus bucked and it was all I could do to hold on and keep him from bolting. There was something down here. Something angry.

I squinted ahead into the dark water as the hippocampus swam in little agitated circles like he wanted to leave now and never come back. I was just wondering if maybe I shouldn't let him go and try to make my way past whatever had made the noise on foot when the roar sounded again. That decided the hippocampus – he bucked again, but this time I wasn't ready for it. I went sailing off his back and down to the cold sea floor, and my ride was gone in a silver flash of scales.

I picked myself up off the silt and reached into my pocket for Anaklusmos. Nico's sword still hung cold and heavy at my side, but if I was going to fight a sea creature I wanted to use my own sword. It seemed more appropriate for the job. I scanned the murky water ahead of me, trying to see what was down here. I didn't want to fight something I couldn't see. The sword's blade elongated in my hands and gave off a faint glow, lighting the water around me just a little.

Then, through the darkness, I saw two glowing eyes. They looked like a cat's eyes when you shine a light on them in the dark, big and yellow and reflective. Then I saw the mouth – a lion's mouth, lined with large yellow teeth as long as my hand. There were two massive golden paws that ended in curved claws like sickles, and a lean body covered in short fur that tapered into a golden-scaled fish tail with powerful fins. Where the mane on a normal lion would have been, this creature had a spiny frill kind of like a lionfish.

In fact, that was what this was – only literally. A _leokampoi_. A fish-tailed lion. And he looked hungry.

I barely had time to think anything else as the monster launched itself at me with one stroke of its tail. I ducked and rolled out of the way, trying to cut at its belly with my sword as it passed. But the leokampoi slid and rolled out of the way and turned to come at me again. It was just as agile as a real cat, only with the advantage of being near-weightless underwater.

Only most cats didn't want to eat me, I reasoned. This one definitely did, opening its mouth and letting out another rumbling roar that made my teeth rattle as it charged me again. I kicked off hard from the sand, launching myself up and over the spiny mane as it darted past. Then I twisted and kicked to angle myself down, reaching out desperately with my free hand for its tail.

Just before the tip of its fin slid beyond my reach, my fingers closed around it and suddenly I was yanked forward with a force that made it feel like my shoulder was going to come out of its socket. _Well, Percy, you wanted to grab it,_ I thought, but that was all I had time to think before the massive tail whipped me around again and nearly into the monster's mouth. I ducked and slashed at the creature's nose, and this time the blade connected. It roared, but the terrible sound was suddenly cut off as Anaklusmos shattered the monster into a cloud of dust that exploded outward, scattering into the water and pushing me away to the sea floor with the force.

I sat there for a moment, trying to clear my head and pull myself together. That had been close. I was pretty sure that another few inches and one of those incisors would've taken off my sword arm. I had to admit, I'd hoped that my Dad might keep me safe from sea monsters during my journey. I tried not to feel hurt, but it was hard. I guessed you really couldn't expect too much when it came to the gods. Just because they did one good thing for you didn't mean they'd keep up the trend. Not even if you were their kid.

But now wasn't the time to think about that. I was close – really close. Close enough to walk the rest of the way, now that the hippocampus was long gone. So I pushed myself up off the sand and turned in the direction of the Trench to finish the journey on foot. It was hard to see where I was going this far down, even with Anaklusmos still drawn and casting a faint light ahead of me. I'd been walking for maybe an hour when I pulled up short and realized I was there.

I'd stopped just at the edge of what looked like a sheer cliff overlooking inky darkness below. There were what looked like mountains rising to the surface in the distance – Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Right in front of me the sea floor dropped away, going all the way down to 28,231 feet. This was it. Milwaukee Deep, the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean. This was an entrance to the Underworld.

Anaklusmos shrank back into pen form and I put it back in my pocket. It was as though it sensed that it wasn't right for the job ahead of me. So instead I drew Nico's sword from my belt and looked over the edge of the sea floor into the cold, crushing darkness below. For a minute I just stood there. I thought about Annabeth and Grover and their worried faces. I thought about Persephone and the pomegranate. I thought about Bianca and Chiron and even my Mom. Then I thought about Nico.

I closed my eyes, gripped Nico's sword tightly in my right hand, and jumped into Milwaukee Deep.


	11. Chapter 10: Familiar Faces

It felt like I was falling faster each second. My descent was speeding up so that when I opened my eyes I could see the sheer rock face rushing past my eyes faster than should have been possible. It almost felt like I was being sucked down a giant drain, and I realized that even if I'd wanted to stop now there was no way I could have. I was in this for good.

The darkness seemed to close in over my head and the weight of the water seemed to push on me from every side. It was cold down here. It felt like all of the heat and life was being sucked out of me and into the water, until I couldn't even see the rock on either side of me. I kept falling into the crushing darkness and suddenly I wasn't sure if I was even traveling through the water anymore.

Then, without warning, my feet hit the ground. I stumbled and fell, Nico's sword skittering out of my grip and across the black grass that covered the ground. I looked up and saw that the sky was grey and dark, with the occasional stalactite hanging from it. The tips just barely penetrated the warm, swampy air and made it clear that the sky here wasn't really the sky, but the bottom of the world.

I'd been here before. And I'd hoped to never be here again – well, at least not until it was my time to die, which I hoped would be a really long time from now. But here I was all over again. I was in the Underworld – more specifically, I was in the Fields of Asphodel. I remembered this place pretty well. It was where everyone who'd just… well, plain _lived_ went. If you weren't particularly good or bad, you went to the Asphodel Fields.

I scrambled to my feet and picked up Nico's sword. All around me, the spirits of the dead ambled past, their voices twittering away. I remembered being here before with Annabeth and Grover. The dead had come up to us and muttered at us, but their voices had sounded far away and we couldn't make out their words. When they'd realized we couldn't understand them or hear them properly, they'd gone on their way.

But this time something was different. This time I could understand them.

I wondered if it was because of Nico. Did I have the ability to understand them because he could? Suddenly the why of it became not so important, though, as I realized that the few dead spirits that had stopped to talk at me had been joined by a few more. And that a even more were heading in our direction.

They seemed almost excited, twittering away so rapidly that even though I could understand their words it was hard to make out what any one of them was saying because they were all talking at once. I began to realize that I might have a pretty serious problem on my hands. The dead were flocking to me like moths to a flame, pressing around me in a circle and I wasn't going to get anywhere with all of them trying to get close to me like I was a movie star and they all wanted my autograph. But unlike fans waiting for an autograph, they weren't going to go away. They wanted me to stay and listen.

But I hadn't come this far just to be waylaid by a bunch of dead people who were excited that they finally had someone to talk to. "Hey!" I shouted, waving Nico's sword around a bit. The spirits backed up enough so that the blade couldn't hit them, looking angry or concerned but still talking. "Move it!" I shouted again, swinging the sword in front of me so they parted and I could walk. They closed in behind me, following me, still talking. Apparently they weren't going to be deterred so easily.

"I don't have time to listen to you," I insisted angrily, still swinging the sword. "I have better things to do. I have to find someone." I wasn't sure if Nico would be in the Asphodel Fields – immediately my eyes snapped to the Fields of Punishment. He wouldn't be there, would he? My fingers went numb at the thought and I shook my head as if I could shake that idea away. No, he couldn't be there. His own father wouldn't put him there. At least, I hoped not.

That thought made me angry, and I waved Nico's sword around again. I really didn't have any time to waste. I had to find him. Never mind that I didn't even know where to start. I ignored the memories of all those nightmares I'd had – the ones where I was lost in the Underworld and trying to find Nico and afraid I would be trapped forever. I shuddered. I really hoped those weren't premonitions.

I turned my attention back to the matter at hand. There was only one way to make sure my nightmares didn't come true, I figured, and that would be to make sure of it myself. I looked out at the dead spirits surrounding me. All of them were muttering and their monotonous voices filled my head like static. There were too many words and too many voices overlaid to make out anything. It was starting to give me a headache. And it wasn't getting me any closer to wherever it was I needed to be.

"All of you had better get out of here!" I shouted at them. "I'm not going to let you slow me down. Unless you know where Nico di Angelo is, get out of my way and leave me alone!" Without warning I swung Nico's sword through the nearest spirit, a bland-faced woman with her hair in a bun who was murmuring on and on about paperwork. As the blade went through her she wavered and then exploded in a shower of gray dust. For a minute I felt terrible – she hadn't exactly been trying to attack me. But I had to do something or I was never going to get out of the Asphodel Fields to find Nico.

Besides, I somehow knew that she wasn't gone forever, anyway. There's no way you can really get rid of someone who's already dead, after all – you can't even get rid of some things that are living (or near enough to it). That's why the monsters of myth keep coming back even after they've been killed. They always manage to reform and reappear again. So I imagined that the woman's spirit would rematerialize later, once all of the dust had coagulated back into her image, and she'd go right on muttering about paperwork and trying to find the next person whose ear she could talk off.

But right now, the other spirits were looking at me and the sword like they might be having second thoughts and talking to me, now that it was clear I meant business. So at least dead spirits didn't like being reduced to dust. Good. I brandished Nico's sword like I meant it this time. I wasn't afraid to start turning every spirit in sight into dust, if that was what it took.

Most of them appeared to get the hint and started backing away, though they were still muttering angrily. Some looked dejected or sad that I wouldn't listen to them, but I didn't have time to feel sorry for them now. If I stayed to listen to them I really _would_ die here. I was sure of that.

As they backed away and started drifting off, it was easier to pick out single voices and make out what they were saying. And amidst the angry muttering I suddenly heard the undertones of a voice I recognized. For a minute I didn't know who it belonged to – I just knew that I recognized it. I looked through the thinning crowd of half-transparent faces, searching for one that I might know.

Finally I saw him. It was Castor – one of Dionysus' twin sons who had been killed during the Battle of the Labyrinth. In the gray, perpetually waning light I could just make out his pale face and blond hair. I bit my lip as my stomach seemed to fill with frozen lead. I hadn't really ever talked to him when he was alive. I hadn't even known which of the twins was which until one of them had died. I'd felt horrible when I'd realized that, watching his body burn atop its funeral pyre the night we laid those who'd fallen in battle to rest. I wondered what his brother Pollux would think if he knew that I had the chance to talk to his twin.

I realized I had to talk to him – maybe I could get him to help. I had to try. "Castor!" I called, trying to get his attention. "Castor, it's Percy!" He turned slowly towards me, eyes cold and dead with no recognition in them. "It's Percy Jackson, we were campers together," I went on, hoping to jog his memory. "We're both half-bloods, and I need your help."

He looked balefully at Nico's sword. I smiled a little ruefully and lowered it to my side. "Sorry," I muttered. I didn't want him to think I'd hurt him – not when he might be able to help. He had to know who Nico was. I mean, the whole camp pretty much knew who had created that big fissure in the dining pavilion. He'd at least know who I was talking about even if they hadn't met.

The problem was, would he even remember his life, or who I was? Would he care enough to help? If I'd noticed one thing, it was that the dead didn't seem to care much about the living. They were trapped inside their own little bubble-universes, wandering around all wrapped up in whatever had bugged them in life. Getting them to care about things that were going on in the living world was pretty difficult. But it could be done – Nico had gotten dead spirits to help him before and so, I realized, had I. I hoped that meant that I might have more luck convincing Castor to help than I might have otherwise. And maybe being a half-blood meant that Castor would be more coherent than your regular spirit off the street (or, well, out of the fields). Bianca had seemed pretty with it, so maybe Castor would remember –

"Nico," I said, staring right into Castor's blue eyes and trying to keep him interested in what I was saying by sheer force of will alone. "Nico di Angelo, Hades' son. You know who he is, right?"

For a minute he just kept staring back at me, blank-eyed. I felt my stomach drop – but then his eyes seemed to grow a little brighter, and Castor nodded. "Nico," he repeated. "Nico di Angelo."

Well, it was a start. I nodded too, emphatically. "Yes. You know him. Have you seen him? Do you know where he is?"

Castor shook his head. "No. I don't know." My stomach dropped again, so far that it felt like it was somewhere in the vicinity of the core of the earth about now. I guess there was no reason I should've expected him to know, but I'd still gotten my hopes up without meaning to.

"Percy Jackson."

I looked up at the new voice. It was also one I recognized, better than I recognized Castor's. This one I could put a name to even before I saw the familiar face. It was Lee Fletcher, the head – well, former head – of the Apollo Cabin. He was standing in front of me only a couple of feet away.

Suddenly the lead feeling in my stomach was back. I guess I'd figured the Underworld was a pretty big place. What were the chances of running into people I knew down here? I'd thought I'd already been pushing luck by running into Castor. But the spirits of the dead were obviously attracted to me somehow, probably because Nico's powers made me able to understand them. I guess it made sense that the spirits of dead half-bloods would be attracted to my presence too, but I guess I'd also really been hoping I wouldn't have to see people I knew again all the same. It was weird – I felt like I should be glad for the familiar faces, but they only made me feel guilty and uncomfortable.

"You're alive," he said. It sounded almost like an accusation, or maybe like he was disappointed. That wasn't exactly helping with the feeling uncomfortable part of things for my part.

I nodded. "Yeah, I am. Look, Lee…" I went on in a rush, figuring if I was talking then I didn't have to be thinking about how bad I felt. "You remember Nico, right? I really need to find him."

He frowned. "Why?"

That was the million-dollar question, wasn't it? I swallowed and decided to go with the easiest explanation. "We have a plan. You know, to defeat Kronos." I lowered my voice. "Nico's really important to it."

"He's dead," Castor said dully, like maybe I didn't know that already. I wanted to stamp my foot and wave my arms around and tell him of _course _I knew that. Why else would I be looking for him here?

Instead I just nodded and looked from Castor to Lee and back again. "I know. But I have to bring him back."

"How?" Lee asked, and the question made my stomach churn.

"I don't know," I admitted honestly, thinking I really wasn't going to get anywhere if I didn't come up with a plan, and soon. "But I have to try. I mean, I know it can be done. It's been done before – er, well, I know somebody tried, before," I corrected, remembering the story. "But Hades let someone go."

"That was different," Lee said slowly. "That was for love."

"… I know," I said, feeling my insides churn themselves up into a Percy's Stomach Smoothie. I scuffed one foot in the beaten dirt amidst the black grass and looked at Lee quietly for a minute. Should I tell him? Would that convince him to help me?

Well, really, what did I have to lose? "This kind of is, too," I said.

Silence.

"Oh," Castor finally said, quietly. "You?"

I nodded, feeling my face turning red. "Yeah." I wished it wouldn't do that every time I told someone I liked Nico. Wasn't it supposed to get better after a while or something?

"That makes things different," Lee suddenly said. Did that mean he was going to help, after all? He looked at the Stygian iron sword in my hand and said, "That's his."

"Yeah."

"You can use it to find him."

I stared at Lee. I could? Why hadn't anyone told me this before? "How?"

He shrugged. "You just can. It knows the way. It's powerful down here."

Well, that was helpful, I thought sarcastically. Nico's sword knew the way? I raised the sword a little – the two spirits backed away warily, but didn't flee – and looked at the flat, dull blade. It just looked like a sword to me. I wasn't sure how I was supposed to use it to find Nico…

I suddenly got a mental image of the sword pointing in one direction, the blade resting at the point where the horizon met the flat, black hills. The blade in my mind pulled at my arm like an insistent dog on a leash. I blinked – was that how I was supposed to do it? Just… dowse for Nico like people in books dowsed for water?

My thoughts were interrupted by Lee. "But once you find him," he said, "you still need a way."

"A way?" I frowned. "A way what?"

"To bring him back," Castor said, matter-of-factly. "You can't just take him."

Lee smiled grimly. "Hades isn't going to just let you waltz in there and take his son."

"He won't let you take anybody," Castor added helpfully.

I wanted to scream. So I was back to square one. Stuck in the Underworld with maybe a way to find Nico, but no way to get him out.

"But it has been done before," Lee said, echoing what I'd said earlier. "He knows a way."

I felt my heartbeat speed up as I looked at him fiercely, eyes wide. "He? Who?" If he knew someone who could help me, he'd better tell me about it!

Castor frowned. "My father doesn't like him, though. I don't like him either."

Lee glanced at Castor, then shrugged. "He may have forsaken your father, but he hasn't forsaken mine."

I clenched my teeth, resisting the urge to drop Nico's sword and start shaking the ghost-Lee by the shoulders. I got the feeling that might not work very well, but it didn't make me want to do it any less. "Who?" I asked again. "Someone here? Can you take me to him?"

Le nodded. "Orpheus," he said solemnly. "Orpheus knows the way." He looked over at Castor, who was looking like he wanted to turn on his heel and leave. "I can tell you where he is."


	12. Chapter 11: Lost and Found

Lee led the way to wherever it was he was taking me, drifting along on half-formed legs. He could actually move pretty fast and it took most of my concentration to keep up while dodging the other spirits meandering through the Asphodel Fields. Castor followed, muttering about how Orpheus was a traitor who had forsaken the gods and didn't deserve the credit he got. I wasn't really sure what he was talking about. "Hey, Lee?" He glanced back at me, still moving. "What's all this about Orpheus forsaking the gods?" I didn't remember that part of the story.

Lee shrugged. "By the end of his life Orpheus had became disillusioned with the worship of the gods. He stopped paying homage to all of them except Apollo." I didn't miss the note of satisfaction in his voice. I guess Lee felt pretty proud that Orpheus had still worshipped his father when he'd decided to ignore the other gods.

"Yeah, but it gets better," Castor muttered from behind me. "One day he went to _my father's_ oracle to pray to _his_ father. How rude was that?" I glanced around at him to see the he was grinning, but it looked kind of sick and twisted. "Well, my father's followers didn't like that. They tore him to pieces and threw his head and his lyre into the Hebrus River." He wrinkled his nose. "Served him right."

I wasn't really sure it did, but I decided not to argue. We continued on in silence for a while longer. I was about to ask where we were going – the landscape was pretty featureless and I had no idea what direction we were heading in or even how far we'd gone – when out of the gray mist ahead appeared a tiny stream of sluggish black water. Sitting on the bank with his back turned was a young man with dark hair. He was trailing one hand in the water and humming softly to himself.

"Orpheus," Lee said, coming to a halt a couple of feet away from him. I felt my heart speed up a little as I stopped too. This was really Orpheus? The one man who'd ever actually gotten Hades to agree to let one of his subjects go?

The figure stopped humming and turned around. He had a pale face that was pretty plain, I thought, for a Greek hero. For a minute his eyes were dull, like his mind was a million miles away. Then they slowly cleared and he looked at the three of us, his gaze eventually resting on me.

"You're alive," he said, obviously speaking to me.

I frowned. What did that have to do with anything? "Yeah," I admitted, frowning. "What does it matter?" I hoped that didn't mean he wouldn't want to help me.

He shrugged. "It's hard not to notice."

"Oh." I wasn't really sure what to say to that. At least he didn't seem angry or nearly as excited about that as most of those other spirits had been. I didn't exactly know what somebody like Orpheus wandered around muttering about, but I didn't really care to find out either. Not unless it helped me get Nico.

"We were looking for you," Lee said.

Orpheus looked over at him. "Me?" He looked confused. "What do you want me for?"

"He wants your help," Lee explained, pointing to me.

I felt kind of uncomfortable being talked about like I wasn't even there. I figured it was time to put in my own two cents. "Look… you're the only person who ever got Hades to agree to let someone go," I said.

His eyes went dull for a minute, like he was thinking. "I guess I am."

That only made me frown deeper. "Hey, wait a second." Something didn't add up here. I tried to remember the rest of what I did know about Orpheus. "Weren't you reunited with Eurydice? You know, when you…" I didn't exactly want to say _ripped to shreds_, now that I knew, so I temporized, "died?"

Orpheus' eyes lit up at that. "Eurydice! Have you seen her? Oh, Eurydice, my love!" His face suddenly fell. "I can't remember… I think she was here… It was a long time ago. I miss her sometimes."

I looked over to Castor and Lee – did they know what he meant? Why couldn't he remember where Eurydice was? I mean, she was pretty much the most important person _ever_ to him, considering what he'd done for her in the myth. What he'd done for her was the reason I was here asking for his help in the first place. How could he have forgotten about her?

But Castor just sighed and rolled his eyes. Lee looked pretty indifferent. "Wait. Let me get this straight," I said, still not understanding. "You _think_ Eurydice was here, but you don't remember when or where she went?"

Orpheus sighed dramatically. "Exactly."

I was really missing something here. "But – but when you were alive, you came all the way to the Underworld to get Hades to give her back! How could you not know where she is now? You're both in the same place again!"

"We are?" Orpheus looked around for a moment before turning back to me. "Don't do that," he said, like I'd played a joke on him. "I don't see her anywhere. Have you seen her?"

I sighed in frustration, gritting my teeth. This sure wasn't getting me anywhere. I still didn't get what was going on. How could he not remember where Eurydice was? And why would she just wander off in the first place, if that was even what had happened? You'd think they'd want to spend forever and ever and probably then some together, even if they were stuck down here in the Asphodel Fields with its black grass and gray, stalactite-studded sky. It was better than nothing, wasn't it?

Behind me Castor was muttering again, this time something about how it was unfair that he had died – why couldn't he and Pollux have the same timeshare program their namesakes had gotten? I frowned, looking from him to Lee. Lee looked only half-interested in what was going on, drifting around a little and looking at the grass.

Orpheus had begun humming a little again. This all seemed so absurd. Suddenly I wondered…

I tried to put together what I knew based on the dead spirits I'd met. And I began to realize that maybe being dead really did get to you, even if you were a half-blood. The dead weren't interested in most of the things the living were. They all seemed hung up on mundane things that frankly seemed pretty insignificant. All most of the spirits in the Asphodel Fields did was wander around and mutter about whatever they saw fit to mutter about. I'd certainly learned that the hard way.

So maybe when you died you just… forgot the things that had been important to you in life. Maybe that even meant you forgot things like… well, like the love of your life. Maybe they just weren't as important when you were dead. Maybe Eurydice really had wandered off after a while, simply because she couldn't remember why she wanted to be with Orpheus so much.

I shuddered. That was really depressing. I mean, I didn't exactly have any illusions of angels singing in choirs and people sitting on clouds with their loved ones when they died. Not after seeing the Underworld and Mount Olympus and everything. But there _was_ Elysium – that had to be better than this, right? Maybe the people there could remember what was important to them. I hoped so. Otherwise what kind of reward was that?

Suddenly I thought that being stuck in the Fields of Asphodel like this, only sometimes remembering what had been important to you when you were alive and mostly just griping about stupid stuff, almost sounded worse than being stuck in the Fields of Punishment. _Almost_.

What if I found Nico and he didn't even remember _me_?

But none of this was getting me any closer to a solution to my own problem. I turned back to Orpheus, who was still humming to himself. "Look, Orpheus. I really do need your help. I need you to… I don't know." I paused, uncomfortably. What could he really do for me? There had to be something he could do. Finally I decided to be direct. "I need you to tell me how to get Hades to let someone go."

He shrugged. "All I did was make him cry."

I felt my mouth fall open at the absurdity of what he'd just said. "What?" Make Hades cry? How was I supposed to do that?

Orpheus waved a hand like it was no big deal. "All I remember is that I was sad – really sad. I wanted Eurydice back… I wish she was here now…" I glared at him, and he went on, though he looked at me sourly. "I went to Hades' palace and I asked for her back. He said no, so I sang about how sad I was. I wanted him to know how I felt. When I was done, I realized he was crying and he said I could have her back."

"But then you broke your part of the deal. You looked back even though you weren't supposed to and she disappeared back into the Underworld forever," Castor sneered. Orpheus' face fell and he nodded sadly.

"I should've known better. Oh, Eurydice… I wish I could see you again! I know you were here…" He shook his head a little. "I don't like to think about it. It just makes me sad again."

Meanwhile, I was trying to grasp at any part of what he'd said and try to use it to figure out how it could help me. Finally I said, "So all you did was sing to Hades. Could you… you know, sing that song for me? The one that made him cry?" It was a pretty long shot – I wasn't much of a singer, believe me. But maybe it really wasn't that hard. Maybe Hades had a soft spot for power ballads or something. I could hope, couldn't I?

Orpheus made a face. "It's a really sad song," he said. "I don't like singing it. And I don't even have a lyre." He suddenly looked away, watching his own reflection in the dark water. "It's just going to make everyone sad, and then I'll be stuck here thinking about Eurydice again. It's better when I forget." He sighed.

I clenched my fists. I wanted to scream at him – didn't he understand how important this was? Just because he was dead and he'd lost his chance to get his lover out of the Underworld, why did he have to ruin mine? My mind raced frantically as I tried to think of some way to persuade him. But what did I have to offer him? I didn't have anything he would want –

_Wait_. Yes I did. "What if I give you something?" I asked, pulling Grover's reed pipes out of my pocket. I'd almost forgotten I had them, but suddenly it looked like they might come in handy after all. I didn't know if dead spirits could play reed pipes, but it was worth a shot.

Orpheus' eyes lit up like a little kid's on Christmas morning. "Reed pipes…" He reached for them greedily, almost snatching them out of my hand before I pulled it back.

"What if I give you the pipes?" I asked. It was clear from the look in his eyes that he liked them. I couldn't do a thing with them, and even if I was going to sing this song for Hades I couldn't play the pipes at the same time. I felt kind of bad just offering up Grover's pipes as a bargaining chip like that, but he had given them to me and he'd understand, right? He could always get a new set…

Orpheus seemed to consider this as he eyed the instrument in my hand. My stomach twisted in on itself as I clenched my teeth and willed him to say yes, practically begging him silently to take the payment I was offering. Right now it was my only chance.

Finally, after a long silence during which Castor was clearly getting restless, Orpheus said, "All right. I'll sing for you if you give them to me. At least it'll give me something to do, to cheer myself up again…"

"Yes!" I said, before I could help myself. Reigning in my excitement, I told myself that this still wasn't a sure thing – I had to hear this song and memorize it before I could find Hades and use it on him. But it was definitely a start. I looked back at Orpheus. "It's a deal, then. You teach me your song and you can have these pipes."

He nodded. Even Castor had fallen silent during our exchange, and despite how much he seemed to dislike Orpheus he actually seemed interested in hearing the song. I shifted from foot to foot as Orpheus' expression turned inward for a minute, like he was trying to remember how it went. Then he took a deep breath and began singing. Even though the words were in ancient Greek, I could understand them perfectly.

_O gods who rule the dark and silent world, _

_To you all born of a woman needs must come. _

_All lovely things at last go down to you. _

_You are the debtor who is always paid. _

_A little while we tarry up on earth. _

_Then we are yours forever and forever. _

_But I seek one who came to you too soon. _

_The bud was picked before the flower bloomed. _

_I tried to bear my loss. I could not bear it. _

_Love was too strong a god. O King, you know_

_If that old tale men tell is true, how once_

_The flowers saw the rape of Proserpine. _

_Then weave again for sweet Eurydice_

_Life's pattern that was taken from the loom_

_Too quickly. See, I ask a little thing, _

_Only that you will lend, not give, her to me. _

_She shall be yours when her years' span is full._

Even as the song melted away into the sticky air, I knew that I could never do something like that. I couldn't really sing and even if I could, I could never sing like _that_. Even though he hadn't had any sort of accompaniment, his voice had seemed like it had a full symphonic orchestra behind it. I felt my eyes getting wet even though I'm the kind of guy that can watch pretty much the saddest movie you can think of and still laugh and forget about it. I don't get weepy over anything, yet here I was, standing in the middle of the Asphodel Fields and feeling like I wanted to cry.

For the first time since I'd started out on this quest, I felt truly defeated. If the only way to get Nico out of here was to do something like that…

I realized Orpheus' expression had changed. The look on his face pretty much exactly mirrored the way I felt inside – empty and lonely. He sat with his mouth open for a minute, then he blinked looked up at me angrily. "There, I did it! And now I feel horrible." He stood up on his ghostly legs and snatched the pipes out of my grasp. "Now go away. I want to be alone."

Honestly, I was only too happy to do just that. I wanted to be alone too – I guess Castor and Lee must have gotten the hint, because they both looked at me and Orpheus and then moved off without so much as a goodbye. Their transparent bodies drifted away from us across the Fields of Asphodel without looking back. Orpheus was still looking at me angrily, and I realized that there wasn't anything else I could ask of him. If that was how he'd gotten Hades to agree to let Eurydice go, then it was clear that there was no way I could use his method to suit my own needs.

"Yeah… thanks," I muttered, and walked away just like Lee and Castor had, away from the little stream and farther into the Fields.

Now I have to say, I'm not really one for self-pity. Moping doesn't get you anywhere and it definitely doesn't get anything done. But moping was exactly what I felt like doing. I found a spot on a low hillside that was pretty devoid of muttering ghosts and sat down, pulling Nico's sword out of my belt and laying on the grass next to my leg. I stared at it for a moment, wondering if maybe, maybe this really was a lost cause.

Maybe I would never see him again. Maybe I was going to have to accept that.

"Why are you so sad?"

I started at the sound of a voice over me. I looked up to see that a young woman spirit had come up to me and was leaning over, her hands just visible on her see-through knees. Curly hair tumbled down over one shoulder, but what was most beautiful about her was her eyes. They weren't like most of the other spirits' – her eyes were focused and full of sadness.

I shifted a little and looked away from her. "I can't do what I came here to do," I mumbled. Not that she would care, I supposed. She probably only wanted to talk to me about whatever she was sad about.

"Oh," she said. But her voice wasn't monotonous. It was soft and sweet. "That is sad. But I guess I understand. I had a boyfriend like that once. But I lost him a long time ago." She paused, sighing. "Just now I thought I heard him."

I looked up, frowning. "You did?"

She nodded, sighing and looking out over the Fields. "Yes. I think about him sometimes. I think he's here, but I don't know where. He's never where I left him."

This was sounding eerily familiar… "Your name's not Eurydice, is it?" I asked, pretty much expecting her to tell me no.

But she didn't. She frowned for a moment and then she said, "Yes, that's it. My name is Eurydice."

I felt a strange mixture or elated and nauseated. "Your boyfriend is Orpheus, then."

"Yes! Oh, have you seen him?" she asked, her eyes twinkling. "I thought I heard him singing. He hasn't sung in such a long time. I think I used to love it when he sang."

I opened my mouth to tell her but for a minute nothing came out. Did I really want to tell her the truth? I mean, chances were she'd probably forget what I'd told her a minute down the road. But she looked so coherent. She looked like she really meant what she said. And who knew? Maybe his song really had reached her – maybe his singing was that powerful even down here. I mean, it had made me feel pretty close to tears.

I suddenly felt ashamed that I'd even thought about lying to her. "Yeah," I said, pointing back the way I'd come. "He's not far. That way."

"Oh! Thank you!" she cried, and the way her voice sounded made me feel just a little bit better. Maybe at least I could help them, even if I couldn't help Nico.

Eurydice was already drifting away down the grass in the direction I'd pointed. But then she stopped and turned back to me. "Oh, and don't give up. On whatever you were trying to do, I mean." She paused, her eyes losing a little of their focus. I felt my stomach drop – great, maybe I had been right. Maybe she was already going to forget –

But then they cleared again and she looked straight at me. "Love shouldn't be kept silent. It should be shared." Then she smiled and glided away like a ghostly girl with a mission, and left me sitting on the black grass with Nico's sword by my side and a funny feeling in my stomach.

--

Author's Note: Orpheus' song comes from Mythology by Edith Hamilton. All of the information on what happened to him is true – he was reunited with Eurydice when he died, though there aren't any details on what part of Hades he went to or what happened after that, so that's where I started taking liberties.


	13. Chapter 12: The Deal

I sat there for a long time. It could have been minutes or it could have been hours. Time passes strangely in the Underworld.

I sat there and stared out across the Asphodel Fields and thought about Orpheus and Eurydice. I wasn't sure if what had happened made me feel hopeful or sick. I mean, it was one thing to be willing to go down into the Underworld to get someone that you loved. I'd even tried it before, when Hades had held my mother captive three years ago. Granted, that wasn't why I'd been sent into the underworld, but the reason I'd been sent and the reason I'd gone had been completely different things that still ended up with the same result. I hadn't saved my mother that way, though. And I couldn't forget that.

Come to think of it, Orpheus hadn't succeeded either. That didn't exactly make for a great track record, when I thought about how likely it was that I could just reason or threaten my way past Hades to get Nico back. But regardless of all of that, my mind kept replaying over the much more recent past – the part where Orpheus and Eurydice had pretty much all but forgotten about each other until they were reminded.

To see them like that, and know that when I died, it would probably be the same…

I didn't know what to think about that. I mean, maybe it wasn't hopeless – I had just sent Eurydice on her way to see Orpheus, and with any luck they'd see each other and maybe that would help them remember. But who was to say that they wouldn't forget about each other again and wander off twenty minutes later? That was the part that made me feel sick. I mean, I was down here to get Nico and go home. But what was the point, if we were just going to forget about each other some day?

But all the same, I couldn't forget the way Eurydice's face had looked when she'd told me that she had a boyfriend who had come down here to try and get her out. Every time I closed my eyes I saw her face, with that look on it that was somewhere between love and sadness. I thought about what it would be like for Nico alone down here. Did he miss me? Did he even know who I was? Did I even matter to him anymore?

I sighed with frustration. All I was doing was chasing my thoughts and a fair amount of guilt around in my head and it was giving me a headache. _Pull yourself together, Percy_, I thought fiercely. _You came down here to do something. You're not going to fail this quest! _I couldn't just leave Nico down here. I wanted him back. I didn't care if I lived one more year or a hundred more, it would be long enough as long as it was with him.

I felt a new sense of resolve, but then I realized that resolve wasn't everything. I still didn't have a plan and I couldn't just waste time sitting here until I thought of one. I got to my feet. I'd been sitting here long enough. Just because I didn't have a plan didn't mean I was going to give up. I'd gone into plenty of situations without plans, and I always managed to find a way out. Even if I had to fight Hades hand to hand, I was going to go to wherever Nico was and I was going to get him back. Eurydice said that love had to be shared – well, I was going to get back the person that I wanted to share it _with._

I still didn't know where he was, but now I knew how to find him. I put my hand on the hilt of his sword and closed my eyes. _Nico_, I thought, trying to clear my mind and picture his face in front of my closed eyelids. _Where is Nico?_

It took some concentration, but again the sword in my mind pointed to where he was and I started walking. Every so often I would close my eyes, feel for Nico again, and adjust my course. I crossed the Fields of Asphodel and came to what must be the edge of them – the black grass gave way to dust, and the dust to stone. I realized that I was approaching something large, a structure of some sort. Then I realized I'd been here before, too.

I was at Hades' palace. The black stone walls and giant bronze gate were familiar as I passed through them unhindered. The gate and courtyard were eerily silent. The whole place felt deserted, like a haunted house or something. I walked up the path to the marble steps, following it beneath the pomegranate trees in the courtyard. As I walked under branches covered in bright orange blooms, I felt a sense of gratitude. Persephone was on my side, I reminded myself. She'd helped me somehow, even if I wasn't sure what exactly eating the fruit she'd given me was supposed to do. As I walked up the steps to the palace, I wondered if I would find that out soon enough.

I'd been in the entry hall before, with its polished bronze floor and black columns beside the door. The walls supported no ceiling and the cavern roof was visible high overhead. Like the last time I'd been here, each doorway I passed through was guarded by a pair of skeletons in military gear from all sorts of time periods and locations. None of them paid any attention to me, and I didn't pay any attention to them. I needed to figure out where in the palace Hades was keeping Nico. I closed my eyes and followed the sword again, and found myself standing at the entrance to a dark, cramped stairway leading up into one of the towers.

Well, I thought, leaning forward and craning my neck to peer up the darkened staircase, there was nowhere to go but up.

I climbed the steps slowly – I wasn't sure what I would find at the top so I kept Nico's sword drawn and ready, feeling my way along the dark wall with my other hand. It felt like the air around me was growing thinner and colder, though I knew I couldn't be _that_ high. I climbed for a good minute or two, until I finally saw a light at the top and managed to coax a little more speed out of my cramping legs and burst out of the staircase and onto the top of the tower.

I stopped just inside the arched doorway, confused. It took my eyes a couple of seconds to adjust to the dim light after the near-darkness of the stairway. The tower was open to the sky and there was a low wall running around the rim, though I didn't think it would really do anyone much good if they stumbled and fell over it. It only came about knee high.

But even as I saw all of that, my mind quickly disregarded it. Because standing directly across from me, maybe only fifteen feet away, was Nico.

He was only half-there, a spirit like everyone else here. But he wasn't murmuring or aimlessly wandering like the other spirits I'd encountered. He was just standing there listlessly and staring off into space. His hair seemed shaggier than I remembered and he looked even paler than usual. But it was Nico, all right. My heart started pounding and I could feel my skin prickling. I'd really found him. Now all I had to do was get him to follow me out of here.

He didn't seem to notice me as I approached. Even when I was standing right in front of him, his gaze went right through me like I wasn't even there. "Nico!" I waved a hand in front of his face but he didn't even seem to notice. He just kept staring straight ahead. His eyes were glassy. I didn't even know if he could see me. "Nico, we have to go," I tried again. "You have to come with me."

Nothing. No response. Suddenly my stomach felt like I was in an elevator dropping far too fast. I didn't know what to do. Could I carry him out? I was pretty sure that wasn't what I was supposed to do. I needed him to follow me. And to do that, I needed him to realize I was there. So I did the only thing I could think of to do. I grabbed him on either side of his head and kissed him, hard.

It was worse than the first time we'd tried to kiss properly. His mouth was there under mine, but it wasn't responding. It was like he didn't even notice I was kissing him. Just like he hadn't noticed my voice or my hand –

"Just what do you think you're doing here?"

I let go of Nico and turned around to see Hades standing behind us. He was normal person-sized (well, as normal person-sized as he got) and looking down his nose at me like he had the last time I had seen him, in the streets of New York. He looked disgusted, like he'd found a piece of hair in his dinner or something.

I felt my face start to grow warm. It felt weird that Hades had caught me kissing Nico, even if Nico hadn't exactly been kissing back. My fists curled at my sides as I forced myself to look up into his eyes. I wasn't going to let him intimidate me, not even here on his home turf. I was on a quest and he wasn't going to stop me. "I'm going to bring Nico back," I said.

Hades' expression darkened. It was pretty frightening, watching his face right then. Part of me wanted to run away. But the rest of me knew that if I did, I'd never see Nico again. I wasn't going to fail now. Not after I'd come this far. I raised my right hand, the one holding Nico's sword, and stood between Hades and his son.

"So you're going to try that, are you?" he asked, sneering down his nose at me. I could feel the silent command behind his voice – he wanted me to put down the sword and give up, just like he'd tried to exert his will over me before. But this time it was different. Just because I felt his will didn't mean I wanted to do what he wanted at all. It was weird – every time he'd tried to make me do something before it had taken a lot of effort to ignore it. This time it didn't take any effort at all. I knew what he was doing, but my body didn't care. It was easy to resist.

I took a step forward, trying to show much more confidence than I actually felt. "I'll do whatever I have to," I said.

Hades actually looked a little surprised that I didn't have to work to resist him at all. Then he sneered. "If you have any sense in that head of yours, you'll leave. _Now_."

But despite the fact that I could practically _feel_ the command in his voice, I resisted it just as easily as I had the last time. I shook my head. "No. Not without Nico." I took another step and put both hands on the hilt of the sword. My heart was pounding so loudly that I wouldn't have been surprised if Hades could hear it.

"There's little you can do to me here," he said, with a sweep of his arm. "And I will not be swayed by words." He looked at me and laughed, darkly. "You're no Orpheus, boy. And you've tried this little quest before. You couldn't get me to release your own mother – Nico is _my son_. What makes you think you'll succeed this time?"

He just made me so angry – the way he looked down at me and the way he laughed and, well, the way he knew exactly the right thing to say to get me riled up. I hated him and I hated the way he made me feel. Without thinking I roared out a hoarse battle cry and lunged at him, not caring that it was probably one of the stupidest things I had ever done and that it might very well be the last thing I would ever do. I just wanted to destroy him, to make him hurt like _I_ hurt and get him to let Nico go. I wasn't thinking about much else.

I hate to admit it, but I didn't even have the chance to get close to him with the sword. As I rushed at him, Hades' eyes turned dark and he swept his hand in front of him and there was a rush of darkness that sent Nico's sword flying away to clatter onto the stone behind me. My hands felt too hot and too cold all at once, and when I looked at them I saw that there were deep gashes on both palms that were starting to ooze blood.

"You cannot hurt me," Hades said, and despite my anger I knew it was true. My stomach clenched and I felt like I was going to be sick. If I couldn't fight for Nico, what else could I do? I suddenly felt a wave of anguish so powerful that it made me want to lay down and cry. But there was no way I was going to do that here. No – there had to be another solution.

I thought furiously about what else I could do. I thought about everything I knew about Hades, about the gods, about everything Annabeth had ever said or done that was clever…

But as I stood there thinking at what felt like a hundred miles an hour, it turned out to be Hades who came up with the solution to my problem. Looking down at me, the god of death began to smile. It was a slow, creeping smile that made my insides squirm.

"I can see you're serious," he said slowly, and I saw his eyes flick from me to Nico, who was still standing at the other end of the tower and staring into space. "I… could be willing to make some kind of deal."

A deal? I stared at him, incredulous.

"I would expect a fair trade for my son," Hades continued, eyes narrowing as he looked straight at me.

I didn't have anything to offer him and I knew it. All I had was a backpack full of spare clothes and a couple of squares of ambrosia in a Ziploc baggie. There wasn't anything else I had except for Riptide and Nico's sword, and neither of those would be something the god wanted. I had nothing to bargain with.

But apparently Hades didn't think so. "I see you're looking confused," he said, and the amusement in his voice was almost scarier than his anger. "It's really quite simple. You say you're willing to do anything. All I'm asking is something of equal value in exchange for what you want." He paused. "A half-blood for a half-blood, Percy Jackson. If you want me to set Nico free, then all you have to do is give me yourself in return." He looked down to the ground, to where he'd knocked Nico's sword out of my hands. He pointed to it. "Take that sword and kill yourself upon it. Then I will set Nico free."

"What?" I gasped. _Kill myself_? For Nico – ?

He just looked at me, and his eyes seemed to say it all. _You heard me the first time. I won't say it again_. "What will it be?"

I stared at him. My mind started racing again. The first thing that came to mind was where I'd come from – the Fields of Asphodel. I thought about Lee and Castor and Orpheus and every other spirit I'd seen wandering in the Fields. I thought about what it would be like to forget about everything I'd ever cared about or wanted in life and go around muttering about absolutely nothing for the rest of eternity. Because I was pretty sure you didn't end up in Elysium for killing yourself.

I thought about my mom – I thought about how she'd feel if I never came home. I had to admit, that made me feel pretty awful. She'd done a lot of selfless things for me, and a lot of them I hadn't even known about at the time. Could I really do something so selfish as to leave her alone for the rest of her life? But there was Paul Blofis, I thought. He was a good guy. He wanted to marry my mom. He'd take care of her. I guessed I'd have to trust him to do it for me, from now on. But maybe with me out of the picture… maybe my mom wouldn't ever be in danger again.

I thought about Annabeth and Grover and Tyson and Chiron, and how Camp Half-Blood would be if I wasn't there. I wasn't sure if it would be all that different or not. I could practically hear Annabeth's angry voice in my ear, telling me off for even thinking such a thing, but even her imaginary lecture didn't seem as persuasive as it should be. I mean, if Nico was alive, there was still a child of the Big Three to fulfill the prophecy. In a way, it _was _a fair trade.

And then I thought about Nico. He hadn't even lived as long as I had, not that I was under any illusions that I'd exactly lived a long time either. But I'd had a pretty okay life, considering. Nico hadn't. There was a lot of stuff he hadn't seen and done. Heck, I was pretty sure he'd never even had birthday cake until that night when he'd shown up outside my window.

I guessed he'd probably be pretty mad at me if I did this. But I also guessed that I wouldn't really be in any fit state to care whether he was mad at me, if I was going to end up wandering around the Asphodel Fields muttering about who knows what. I wasn't sure if that made it hurt more or less, though.

I turned to look at Nico, seeing his blank face and blank eyes and feeling like if my heart really were something that could break, it would be doing that right now. It made my chest _hurt_ to see him there like this. I thought about Orpheus and Eurydice. And then I thought, _I didn't come down here to fail_.

I turned around to face Hades. "Okay," I said. "It's a deal."


	14. Chapter 13: A Way Out

The funny thing is, dying on Nico's sword didn't hurt as much as I thought it would. Don't get me wrong – it hurt a heck of a lot. More than anything else had ever hurt in my life. But it just didn't feel like I guessed I thought it would, when I'd thought about dying. (Because when you're a half-blood like me, it's pretty much a given that you've thought long and hard about dying at least once or twice in your life.)

Well, okay. First let me back up a bit, to the part where I agreed to trade my life for Nico's.

I turned back around and looked Hades right in the eyes. "Swear it, then. On the River Styx." I wasn't going to let him get away with reneging on his end of the bargain. If he was lying, I swore I would find a way to remember enough to march right back down here and do something about it.

The god of death held up his hands as if to placate me. "I swear to you, Perseus Jackson, that if you take that sword up and kill yourself on it then I will set my son Nico free. His free will and his life will be restored, and he may leave if he so chooses. I swear this on the River Styx." He looked at me. "Does that satisfy you?"

I felt like I had a horde of angry butterflies in my stomach. I was pretty sure I was scared out of my wits. I felt like everything was suddenly moving too fast. But I tried not to show any of that on my face as I nodded and said, "Yeah. That's fine."

Hades returned my nod. Then his eyes fell on Nico's sword, which was still on the ground behind me. "Then I believe you owe me something."

My arms and legs felt heavy as I turned and walked over to the sword. I picked it up in a hand that felt almost numb. I looked at the black blade for a minute, and then up at Nico. I was standing almost directly in front of him now.

Even though he couldn't see me, I smiled as bravely as I could. "Hey, Nico," I whispered, "please don't be mad, okay? Just… don't get yourself killed again. It's all up to you now." Part of me wanted to kiss him again, but the rest of me knew that he wouldn't even notice. And somehow I just couldn't do it again in front of Hades.

I turned back around and looked at the god, standing there tall and dark at the other end of the tower. He was watching me quietly, his face unreadable and his eyes cold. Well, I thought, this was it. I guessed it wasn't the worst way I could've gone. At least it had been my choice.

Trying to keep my hands as steady as I could, I knelt on the ground. I braced the hilt against the stone and placed the point of the sword over my heart. If I was going to do this, it was going to be as quick as possible. Through the heart was the fastest way I could think of to die.

I knelt there with the point resting over my chest for what felt like eternity, though it was only a couple of seconds in reality. My mind was racing almost out of control. I thought about how there was so much I'd wanted to do. But it was okay now, I told myself. Everything would be okay. And then I shoved myself forward.

A hot, tight feeling of pain stabbed up my chest and spread through my body. I slumped over the sword as all my strength went out of me in a rush. I felt something hot and sticky and thick slide over my hands as blood started to run down the sword. My blood.

I did my best not to cry out – I didn't want to give Hades the satisfaction, even though I couldn't even look up to see him anymore. My vision was starting to narrow to the stone directly in front of me. I swear I could actually feel my heart stopping as the sword got in the way and prevented it from beating any more.

Then I heard a voice behind me. "What… Percy?"

I couldn't turn around. Instead I kind of fell over onto my side, which I couldn't really feel very well anyway. The stone was already slick and warm with my blood, but I was getting colder by the second. I was getting so cold that the pain wasn't even all that painful anymore.

"_Percy_!"

There were footsteps – real footsteps! – behind me and hands were grabbing at me, pulling me up. Nico's face filled my field of view. It was Nico's face the way it _should_ be, expressive and under his own control. Not blank and unresponsive, even though he looked pretty anguished just now. I suddenly wanted to make him feel better. I wanted to make him understand.

_Hey_, I tried to say, like there was nothing wrong, but all I could get out was something that sounded like, "He –" My lungs weren't really working anymore. But right about then was when things stopped hurting completely. I wasn't in pain anymore and I wasn't cold. I wasn't anything, and it was the nicest feeling in the world.

And then I realized I was dead.

It's a pretty weird thing, to realize you're dead. It's really a liberating feeling – suddenly nothing matters to you and nothing seems important. I could feel my body lying there on the stone, with Nico's sword still through my heart and my blood pooling underneath me and soaking into my clothes. But none of it mattered anymore. None of it was my concern.

My eyes were still open and I could see what was going on, though it seemed like I was looking through wax paper. Things weren't quite in focus. Nico had gotten up, laying my body back down on the stone. His back was turned and I could hear his voice – he was screaming something at Hades but I couldn't make out the words. It sounded like I was underwater. I could tell he was talking but I couldn't hear what he was saying.

The two of them argued for a while. Then I saw the dark smudge that was Hades turn on his heel and leave. The figure left in front of me stood there for a moment, and then he turned back around to face me. He looked suddenly surprised and I realized that I wasn't lying on the ground anymore. I was upright, looking him in the face. His features were hard to make out through the wax-paper-filter on my vision.

He looked down. Dimly curious, I looked down too. I had no feet – my body became transparent and kind of disappeared off into nothingness somewhere below my knees. There was a dark stain spreading across the stone beneath me, and a black sword was lying in the middle of it. Nothing else.

I didn't much care about any of that, though. All I really cared about was that I was dead and that nothing else could really affect me now. It was a strange sense of calm. It blanketed my thoughts and emotions just like being wrapped in a physical blanket. I was safe here. Nothing could hurt or touch me again. I knew that I had something that I'd left undone but I couldn't remember what it was. There was a sense of regret that ate away at my calm, but it wasn't strong enough to make me want to do anything. It was just kind of annoying.

Maybe the person standing in front of me wanted to hear about it. I opened my mouth to complain to him about whatever it was that I hadn't done, but he was faster and spoke first.

"Percy," Nico said, and suddenly his voice was clear. It was like the filters were yanked off my ears and eyes and suddenly I recognized him and wondered how I could have forgotten, even for a second, who he was. His face looked weird, I thought, and for a minute I couldn't figure out why.

Then I realized it was because he was crying.

"Percy," he said again, and even though his eyes were wet his voice didn't waver at all. "I know you can think straight if I will it. Can you understand me?"

I nodded. "Nico – " I wasn't sure what I could say.

"Tell me everything," he said. His voice was commanding, and the command spread through every fiber of my being until I didn't have a choice. I had to answer him. So I did.

Talking about things isn't so hard when you're a ghost. So I started at the beginning and just kept going until I got to the end. Partway through, Nico had picked up his sword. He'd stared at it like it was something he hated with all his soul, but he'd cleaned it on the sleeve of his coat and kept on listening as I talked the whole time.

Finally I stopped, having gotten to the part where I'd, well, died. He knew the rest. By that point Nico was staring at me and he was quiet for a couple of minutes afterward. I wasn't sure what to feel or how much of it I even felt. Talking to Nico like this, I felt a lot more emotionally connected to my life than I had before he'd somehow commanded me to pay attention. But it still was only a partial connection – as long as he needed me to, I could think like the old Percy Jackson. But as soon as he stopped paying attention I knew I wouldn't care anymore.

"Percy," Nico said slowly, "tell me again what my father swore to you. In his words exactly."

I told him. Nico was silent for another couple of minutes, until –

"… Oh, gods, Percy!" he exclaimed, as his face lit up. "You said Persephone came to you?"

I nodded.

"And she gave you a pomegranate to eat, right? And you ate it."

I nodded again.

"Well, what you said – Annabeth was right. Fuck, Percy – this means – Percy, we have to get out of here." Suddenly Nico was talking so fast he was nearly tripping over his words. "You said you came in through an underwater trench?" I nodded a third time. "Can you take me there? Now?"

It was that same commanding tone of voice. I had no choice but to listen to him and obey. "Yeah," I said. "I can."

"Then do it."

So I did. I led Nico down the stairs and out of Hades' palace. We didn't talk – he just followed me as I half-walked, half floated silently back the way I'd come. I'm not sure how I remembered where I'd come from, but the commanding tone of Nico's voice had pretty much put me on autopilot. Something in me wanted to look back at him as we walked, to try and explain. But I couldn't think of the right words to say and I didn't know what good it would do anyway.

I tried to think about what he'd said – how Annabeth had been right about something that had to do with the pomegranate. That seemed like such a long time ago now. But I still didn't know how it was going to do me much good. I'd promised Hades myself for Nico. I didn't think he was just going to let us both walk out of here.

It turns out I was right. We were approaching the place where I'd arrived in the Underworld when I heard Hades' voice.

"Stop."

Behind me I sensed Nico stop and turn around. I followed in time to see him raise his sword in a defensive stance. Before us stood the towering form of Hades. "I believe," the god said, looking straight at me, "that you have something of mine."

Nico glanced at me too before looking back at his father. His face was set and determined. "No," he said defiantly, "I don't."

Hades actually looked a little bemused – one eyebrow rose as he looked down at his son. "I'm afraid you're mistaken," he said, and swept a hand in my direction. "He belongs to me. We had a deal. I've kept my end of it and I expect him to keep his. You will not interfere."

"He has kept it," Nico said steadily. "He told me the deal you swore to him. You swore that if he killed himself, you would set me free. Nothing more."

Hades' face grew grim, like he didn't like where he thought this conversation might be going. I still wasn't sure what Nico meant, but I had a feeling I was about to find out. "And he has. He is dead. He belongs to me now."

"No, he doesn't," Nico said calmly, though he remained on guard with the sword raised. "His soul is tied to the living world. The bargain you made has been fulfilled, but you can't keep him here."

Hades' expression went from unhappy to angry. It didn't bother me too much since I was already dead, but I did suddenly feel a pang of worry for Nico. It wasn't a good idea to make Hades mad and besides, I didn't know what he meant. I was a spirit and that meant I fell under Hades' power. What did Nico mean when he said that Hades couldn't keep me here?

"And just _how_ is his soul tied to the living world?" Hades wanted to know, glaring at me now. I could only look blankly back at him.

Nico answered for me. "Because Persephone gave him a pomegranate to eat before he came here."

Hades whipped around and stared at Nico again, the anger on his face transforming all the way to fury now. "_Persephone_!" he said, and I could see the air around him start to shimmer like it does over the asphalt of a street on a really hot day. The god of death was angrier than I'd ever seen him before. Nico didn't waver. Hades turned again to look at me, his eyes glowing like two red-hot coals. "Is this true?" he hissed.

I nodded. "Yes."

Silence fell. Hades continued to fume, but he didn't say anything for a long time. Nico didn't move – his sword remained at the ready. I just floated there, only sort of sure as to what was going on. It obviously had to do with my eating the pomegranate before I left on my quest. It had tied my soul to the living world somwhow… so that meant Hades really didn't have any power over me? I began to actually feel something – hope. Hope that we might both get out of this alive. Hope that we could win.

"I will speak with Persephone when I see her next," Hades finally said. His voice was quiet and dark and just barely controlled. "I will _not_ be made a fool of, Percy Jackson." He strode up to me and looked down, towering above my head. "You may go back to the living world today, but everyone comes back to me in the end. And I never forget _anything._ You'd best remember that."

Then, with a sound like a muffled thunderclap, he was gone. Nico stood tensed for a minute longer before he slumped, the sword's point dropping until it was resting on the ground. He looked over at me. He looked tired. But he also looked triumphant.

And I realized I was starting to feel much better. Much more like myself – we were close to the edge of the Underworld, closest to where it touched the world of the living. It was like I could feel something draining away from me, but instead of making me weaker, it was actually making me stronger. I looked down at Nico and finally knew what it was I had left unfinished.

"Come on, Nico," I said, taking his hand and turning to go. "Let's go home."


	15. Chapter 14: The Beach

Of course, we didn't exactly go _home_. We came up a couple of miles south of the trench, near a deserted beach with sand so white it was almost blinding in the midday sun. As we rose through the water I felt myself becoming more solid and more real until, by the time we reached the surface, I felt whole and alive again. It was like waking up from a dream and watching the world come back into focus around me. My life and my feelings were real again and now that I realized that, the way I'd lacked them in the Underworld frightened me.

I pulled Nico up out of the surf and onto the beach alongside me. I didn't really care where we were, just that we weren't underwater or anywhere near the Underworld right now. Suddenly I got a faceful of seawater, and Nico was on his side coughing and hacking. I didn't know what to do, so I pounded him on the back.

"Ow!" he said in between coughs. "You're going to kill me all over again!"

I grinned. I felt giddy. It was hard to think and I didn't even know what to do now that I'd gotten him back. Because I'd done it – I really had gotten him back. My chest felt like it was swelling and my head felt like it might explode.

I took a deep breath, breathing in _Eau de Seawater and Nico._ I grinned stupidly. It smelled perfect.

"What are you doing?" he asked, pulling a piece of kelp out of his matted dark hair and tossing it onto the beach.

I kept grinning. "You smell nice."

Nico made a face. "I'm covered with seawater and sand." He rolled his eyes. "Only _you_ would think that smelled nice."

"You're one to talk, dead boy."

"I – " Nico stopped, his mouth still open. He blinked at me for a minute, like he was seeing me for the first time. "Percy, you…"

And then before I even knew what was happening he'd shoved me back onto the sand and crawled on top of me, pushing me down like he could trap me there and keep me like that forever. Let me tell you, right at that moment I would've let him. Right then I didn't care if I never went home or saw my friends ever again. The world could go to pot and Kronos could rule heaven and earth and all that mattered to me was the sand at my back and Nico on top of me, his dark eyes so close that I almost went crosseyed looking up into them.

"I just did what I had to," I told him quietly, feeling kind of stupid all of a sudden. "You saved me as much as I saved you, all right?" Because that was absolutely true. My mind was still kind of sluggish and slow, but it was starting to work again as I tried to grasp the full weight of what had just happened. Hades was not going to be happy, I realized. I was pretty sure he would have liked nothing more than to have kept me there forever. And I was also pretty sure that I'd only gotten off on a technicality.

Nico looked at me for a long time. I looked right back at him, trying to memorize the way his face looked just then and make the moment last forever. I knew it couldn't, but the longer we could put off reality the happier I would be. After a stretch of silence that actually wasn't uncomfortable at all, I leaned up just far enough to kiss him, softly.

I mean, we were guys. Guys didn't tell each other that they loved them, did they? But I guess I pretty much did – I loved Nico, and suddenly I wanted him to know. If love was meant to be shared, then I was supposed to share it, right? It felt weird thinking about saying it out loud, but I thought that maybe if I could just _show_ him –

Nico appeared to understand. His mouth was molding to mine as he pushed me back down against the sand, deepening the kiss until I wasn't sure where I ended and he began.

"My dad can't ever have you," he said quietly, and I realized that his hands were sneaking under my blood-soaked shirt and up my stomach, skin on skin. He pushed himself down on me even more and I squirmed, which was obviously his plan because we both groaned and then he kept moving and sliding against me. "He can't have you because you're mine."

"Nico," I heard myself gasp, though I'd never heard my voice sound like _that_ before. And I didn't care. Let him hear me like that – Nico di Angelo was the only person on this earth that I would ever sound like that for, and at that moment we both knew it.

"Mine," he whispered each time his hips moved against me. "Mine, mine, _mine_."

* * *

"Percy."

I blinked slowly, feeling gritty and sore and my left arm was numb where Nico was sleeping on it. I thought I'd heard someone calling my name, but Nico was asleep and there was no one for miles, let alone anyone who knew my name. I scooted a little closer to Nico and had just started drifting back to sleep when I heard the voice again.

"Perseus."

I knew that voice, I realized. It was familiar. It was…

I blinked, sitting up so abruptly that Nico moaned and swatted at me, trying to pull me back down. I turned my head in the direction of the voice, praying that I really had been dreaming. But I hadn't.

I swallowed. I was covered with sand and my clothes were not exactly within arms' reach. "… Dad," I managed to say, trying not to look at his face but at his chest, at the buttons of his Hawaiian print shirt instead. You'd think that getting caught naked with your boyfriend would be pretty nearly the most embarrassing thing ever. And then you'd think that getting caught naked with your boyfriend by your dad would be even worse. But getting caught naked with your boyfriend by your dad who's a _god_ has got to top the charts for the most embarrassing thing that could ever happen. I wondered if there was some quota of embarrassment that you were supposed to fill in your lifetime. If that was true, I really had to be about done for the rest of… well, _ever_.

Beside me Nico moved and looked up, blinking blearily at me. I cocked my head in the direction of my father and watched Nico's gaze follow it – and then he abruptly turned red and sat up too, only he managed to mostly hide himself behind me. _Cheater_, I thought, pulling my legs up to my chest.

Poseidon just looked at us for a minute. He didn't look embarrassed or angry or anything, but that was almost worse than if he had. I couldn't tell what he was thinking at all, but I knew that if he had come here to forbid me from doing whatever this was then I was going to have to defy him. I just really hoped that wasn't the case. I liked my dad – well, at least I liked him when he wasn't staring at me and Nico sitting there on the beach naked. But he really was an okay guy. He'd been proud of me in the past. I just hoped he could be proud of me now.

"You've made a lot of gods very… uncomfortable," he said at last. "And you've made Hades very angry."

Nico frowned. "We don't care."

I glanced over at him. I guessed we didn't, really, but… could we afford not to? When you're a half-blood, not caring can get you killed just as quickly as caring about the wrong thing. Maybe we didn't care, but I wasn't sure that flaunting that fact was exactly the best strategy.

Then my dad did something I'd never expected – he chuckled. My head swung around to face him again, staring. Now I was confused. We'd made a lot of gods uncomfortable, royally pissed off the god of the dead, and my dad thought it was funny?

"I suppose you don't care, do you? Ah, I remember what it's like to be in love." I squirmed as he looked down at us with a funny, nostalgic smile. "But remember, love has gotten no small number of heroes up to their necks in trouble before they knew it.

Wasn't that the truth. But we weren't in trouble now – at least, it didn't seem like it. But I still wasn't exactly sure. "Dad…" I paused – I almost didn't want to ask the question, but I had to know. "Are you angry?"

He was silent for a long time. All traces of laughter had gone from his face and his expression was serious again. "No," he finally said quietly, after what felt like forever, "I'm not angry, Percy. Do you think I should be?"

"Uh," I said, wondering how exactly I was supposed to answer that question. "I mean, no, I don't want you to be mad. But," I pressed on, realizing there was more to this than just what I wanted or even what he wanted, "I know the gods don't like…" I gestured to Nico and then myself, "stuff like this."

Nico grabbed my arm, and when I looked at him he looked scared and determined all at once. "I don't care what the gods don't like. I'm not giving you up for anything," he said, and the way his voice sounded, the way we'd just, well, made love not too long ago, I know that he meant it.

And I felt the same way. "Me either, Nico," I assured him.

"Then I will see that you don't have to."

We both turned to look up at my dad again. I had to admit, I was a little surprised. He was sticking his neck out for us, and I was pretty sure that gods didn't do that for just anybody. Heck, they didn't even do it for their fellow gods, most of the time.

"You've done well, Percy," Poseidon said, and suddenly my stomach felt like it was full of butterflies, like I was about to go into the living room on Christmas morning. "What you did, you did not only out of love, but out of a desire to protect the world and Olympus from the threats of Kronos." He paused, looking at us both. "I will go back to Olympus and make sure the gods know these things."

"Thanks!" I said, almost leaping up off the sand before I remembered I wasn't wearing anything and just shifted embarrassedly around. "Really. Thank you, dad."

"Don't thank me just yet," he said, and tilted his head. "There are those who aren't going to take it on my word that you deserve to remain safe. Hades will be among them." He looked at Nico, and something silent seemed to pass between them.

Nico nodded. "I know."

"Then I will leave you to each other," Poseidon said, and a smile began to tug at the edges of his lips again. "When you feel you're ready, you'll have help getting home," he said to me, and then suddenly he was gone, leaving only the salt smell of the sea wafting on the breeze where he'd been.

We sat there for a minute, just listening to the sound of the surf on the beach. Then Nico turned to me, looking up with dark eyes and a wry sort of smile. "Well, that was… kinda weird."

I laughed, nodding. "Yeah, kinda." I looked down at him, and suddenly I couldn't stop myself from grinning. "He seemed to like you, though. That's good, right?" I had to admit, it made me feel a whole lot better to know that my dad wasn't going to forbid me from being with Nico. He was even going to try to _defend_ us…

"I guess it's good that one of our dads is okay with this," he said, running one hand up my chest and stopping at the place where the skin was raw and new. There was a shiny white scar, the width of Nico's sword, directly over my heart.

"Hey… are you really okay with all this?" I asked, suddenly worried. "I mean, you stood up to your dad and now he's really angry – "

This time Nico laughed, though it wasn't as carefree as my laughter had been. "I'm not afraid of him," he said, looking up at me. "And… I don't care what he thinks. I really don't."

I wasn't sure if Nico was telling the truth, but it wasn't the time or place to try to ask him about it. Instead I just looped my arms around him and hugged him close.

I wish I could say that after a while we got up and got dressed and worked out a way to get home. But the truth was, we didn't. We stayed on that beach all day and into the night, sitting together in the sand and talking about nothing, or sometimes not even talking at all. It was like I couldn't get enough of touching Nico and he couldn't get enough of touching me. I wanted to memorize the way every part of him felt, even covered in salt and sand because that made it all the much nicer. I guess I have weird tastes, but Nico didn't seem to care, even when he ran his hands through his hair and made a face and complained about how he'd be washing sand out of his hair for weeks. I just grinned and told him I didn't mind, and he told me it was because I was weird, and that started a whole round of tussling that led to something much nicer than tussling that led to us lying on the beach with our sides pressed together and our fingers intertwined as we stared up at the night sky full of more stars than you could see even from Montauk.

But by the time the morning came, we knew we had to get back. I didn't know how long I'd been gone, but I was pretty sure that I was going to be in deep trouble the instant I got back. Nico said he'd take some of the blame for it, but I wasn't so sure it worked that way. How can you take the blame for something when you were dead?

We eventually found our clothes and struggled back into them – everything we owned was crusted over with sea salt and my t-shirt was torn over the chest and had been pretty much soaked in blood. Our shoes were pretty much dead, so we just looped the laces together and brought them along to throw out when we got back to camp. You don't get to be best friends with a satyr and ever consider leaving your garbage in the wild ever again, I can vouch for that.

True to his word, when Nico and I were ready to go and had turned toward the ocean, there were two magnificent hippocampi whinnying and waiting for us to mount them. Nico didn't have enough of me in him to breathe underwater, but I was able to craft a sort of bubble around his head so he could breathe as we raced northwards under the waves. He looked like an out-of-place hero from a science fiction novel gone wrong, sitting astride a creature that was half-fish, half-horse with a dark sword stuck through his belt. When I told him so, he just made a face and whacked me on the arm.

It only took about a day of travel to get us back to the coast of New York. We arrived off the shore of Camp Half-Blood just as the sun was rising, so the sky was still more orangey-yellow than blue. The trip had been hard, but I could tell that neither of us was still quite ready to return to camp – and everything that came with it – just yet. But as the hippocampi let us slide off their backs and accepted a few grateful noserubs in thanks, I knew that we couldn't put it off any longer. We were home.

I turned to look at Nico, watching him in the early morning light as he started heading up the beach. When he realized I wasn't following he stopped, cocking his head and offering a hand back to me. "Well, come on. We're in this together, remember."

I grinned and took his hand. "Yeah. We are."

We walked hand-in-hand up the beach towards Camp Half-Blood, knowing that this definitely wasn't over yet. I was pretty sure Chiron was going to kill me for leaving, and if he didn't then Mom was probably going to kill me for it. But even the thought of having to face their anger couldn't make me feel any less happy just then. Nico was back where he belonged, and I was too. And no matter how strong the gods or even their enemies were, love was even stronger than that. And we were going to prove it.

_The End_


End file.
